human rights

human rights On 5 December 1948 the UNO General Assembly passed a Declaration of Human Rights, the first ever recognition that the safeguard of basic freedoms and human rights, regardless of race, sex, language, or religion, was an international concern. Passed unanimously, with the USSR and five Eastern European countries, as well as Saudi Arabia and South Africa, abstaining, its clauses were not legally binding, though they have become the basis of international law. In 1976 it was complemented by an international agreement on social, economic, and cultural rights (signed by 129 states by 1995) and an international treaty of civil and political rights (signed by 127 states by 1995). These stipulated the right to live, the freedom of expression and religion, the protection of minorities, and the prohibition of torture. An additional protocol of 15 December 1989 condemning capital punishment has so far only been accepted by 23 states. Moreover, over twenty individual agreements have been signed thus far, including the prohibition of genocide (12 January 1951), the condemnation of apartheid (18 July 1976), and opposition to the discrimination against women (3 September 1981).

By their very nature, human rights have been universal. This gave them their moral power, since opposition to human rights was hard to justify, as the regimes of Soviet Europe were to find out after they had subscribed to the maintenance of human rights at Helsinki. However, this universality also proved to be their weakness. They could be universally claimed and defined, and hence consensus about what human rights constituted was impossible to achieve. The only point of agreement was that universal rights have not been realized. In the face of globalization, the gap between rich and poor increased during the 1990s. According to the 2001 UN Development Report, 1.2 bn. people had less than $1 per day to live on, and 2.8 bn. people lived on less than $2 per day. 2.4 bn. people had no access to basic sanitation, and over 850 million people were illiterate. There were about 50 million refugees in 2000, with reports of over 300,000 people being tortured, missing, or executed (though the true figure for this was likely to be much higher). In 2000, an estimated 300,000 children below the age of 18 fought as soldiers in civil wars and international conflicts. Under the authority of the Security Council of the UN, a number of courts were established to deal with international human rights abuses. In 1993 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was set up in The Hague, whose most prominent case from 2002 involved the former Serb leader, Milošević. An International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was set up in 1994.

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