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| Universal Declaration of Human Rights | |
 Eleanor Roosevelt with the Spanish version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. |
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| Created | 1948 |
|---|---|
| Ratified | 1948-12-10 |
| Authors | John Peters Humphrey, among others |
| Purpose | Human rights |
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris). The Guinness Book of Records describes the UDHR as the "Most Translated Document""The United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education", 1995 - 2004", United Nations General Assembly, issued 7 Sept 2000, retrieved 7 May 2007.[1] in the world. It consists of 30 articles which outline the view of the General Assembly on the human rights guaranteed to all people. The International Bill of Human Rights consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols. In 1966 the General Assembly adopted the two detailed Covenants which complete the International Bill of Human Rights; and in 1976, after the Covenants had been ratified by a sufficient number of individual nations, the Bill took on the force of international law.Paul Williams, Ed., "The International Bill of Human Rights", Entwhistle, 1981. This is the first book edition (ISBN 0-034558-07-8) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with a forward by Jimmy Carter.
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Prior to the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, several countries had proclaimed comparable declarations. Examples include the Bill of Rights of England, the Bill of Rights in the United States, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France. When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became apparent after the Second World War, the consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently define the rights it referenced. http://www.udhr.org/history/overview.htm#Cataclysm%20and%20World%20Response http://www.udhr.org/Introduction/question4.htm A universal declaration that specified the rights of individuals was necessary http://www.universalrights.net/main/creation.htm. Canadian John Peters Humphrey was called upon by the United Nations Secretary-General to work on the project and became the Declaration\'s principal drafter. Humphrey was assisted by Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States, Jacques Maritain and René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, and P. C. Chang of the Republic of China, among others. According to Globalizing Family Values, the Declaration\'s pro-family phrases were the result of the Christian Democratic movement\'s influence on Cassin and Malik.Carlson, Allan (January 12, 2004. Globalizing Family Values.
The proclamation was ratified during the General Assembly on 10 December 1948 by a vote of 48 in favour, 0 against, with 8 abstentions (all Soviet Bloc states, South Africa and Saudi Arabia).See http://www.unac.org/rights/question.html under "Who are the signatories of the Declaration?" Despite the central role played by Canadian John Humphrey, the Canadian Government at first abstained from voting on the Declaration\'s draft, but later voted in favour of the final draft in the General Assembly.http://www.journal.law.mcgill.ca/abs/vol43/2schab.pdf
The document is laid out in the civil law tradition, including a preamble followed by thirty articles. It was conceived as a statement of objectives to be followed by governments. Some international lawyers believe that the Declaration forms part of customary international law and is a powerful tool in applying diplomatic and moral pressure to governments that violate any of its articles. The 1968 United Nations International Conference on Human Rights advised that it "constitutes an obligation for the members of the international community" to all persons. The declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It continues to be widely cited by academics, advocates, and constitutional courts.
Some conservatives and libertarians believe that economic rights must be provided by others through forceful extraction, for example taxation, and that they negate other peoples\' inalienable rights.See Capitalism Magazine - United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Destroys Individual Rights Retrieved 22 June 2006. In reference to Article 25\'s declaration of a right to medical care, Andrew Bissell argued, "Health care doesn’t simply grow on trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others...no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to one’s efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients’ lives depend."http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--1297-Right_To_Health_Care.aspx Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, argued that certain economic rights cannot be human rights; Kirkpatrick called the Declaration "a letter to Santa Claus",http://www.humaninfo.org/aviva/ch65.htm saying, "Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of \'entitlements\', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors."http://www.unsystem.org/SCN/archives/scnnews18/ch06.htm
The first, and presumably the most important, sentence of the UN foundational document, the United Nations Charter, states"We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war ..."The human right to refuse to participate in "the scourge of war" is, however, omitted from the UN\'s Declaration of Human Rights. This appears contradictory since this Declaration was produced by the same members who wrote the first sentence of the United Nations Charter. This contradiction is currently carried out in practice every time one of those same founding member nations imprisons a person who exercises that implied human right, thereby logically becoming a violator of that implied human right.[2] In some cases the refusal to participate in “the scourge of war” is not merely a right, but indeed a legal obligation as we see in this quote about the UN\'s official formulation of the Nuremberg Principles into International Law in 1950:
Ensuring that obligation of the above International Law is met requires a logically concomitant precautionary principle to allow, at a minimum, the right of an individual refuse to participate in "the scourge of war." Therefore this concomitant "human right" is a glaring omission from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights."Under UN General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), paragraph (a), the International Law Commission was directed to "formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal.""[3][4]
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