Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was an immediate outcome of the creation of the United Nations. It was an international recognition and global response to sufferings and atrocities, such as the Holocaust, perpetuated by governments and regimes against individuals and peoples. This declaration made commonplace the concept of human rights—that is, rights pertaining to persons as humans and not merely as citizens of a particular country—and shaped later international law and treaties on that basis. Although the UDHR was not ratified until the end of 1948, three years after the formation of the United Nations, work on this declaration began with the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945, particularly with the establishment of the UN Commission on Human Rights, in 1946, and a mandate by the UN General Assembly to draft an international bill of rights. Social and political theorists had long spoken of the concept of natural rights to designate rights that individuals hold simply as individuals, as opposed to the concept of legal rights that individuals hold as citizens within some legal system. However, not until the middle of the twentieth century, following the Nuremberg and Tokyo war trials, was there an international political push to foster and implement rights in a more global context. The language of natural rights quickly transformed into that of human rights—rights possessed by all humans regardless of their citizenship—with a corresponding assertion of the international responsibility to respect and enforce these rights pertaining to all humans. Following ratification of the UDHR, the UN General Assembly passed numerous other documents promoting and extending human rights, as did many other governmental and nongovernmental bodies. The UDHR itself came to be referred to as the first component of the International Bill of Human Rights, with later components being the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, both passed in 1966.