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World history
Course: World history > Unit 6
Lesson 12: Human rightsInternational Human Rights
After the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, the world (through the United Nations) tries to articulate universal human rights.
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- China was in the midst of a Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists in 1948 when the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed.
Who was representing China when the charter was signed?(4 votes)- The Nationalists represented China in the United Nations until 1971.(3 votes)
- Which countries voted against the UDHR?(4 votes)
- How effective really was the UDHR? Or was it really effective? There are still many people living in bad conditions, so could the UN intervene?(2 votes)
- The influence of the UDHR has been substantial. Its principles have been incorporated into the constitutions of most of the more than 185 nations now in the UN. Although a declaration is not a legally binding document, the Universal Declaration has achieved the status of customary international law because people regard it "as a common standard of achievement for all people and all nations." http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-1/short-history.htm(4 votes)
- It says the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put forth in 1948, and it says in Article 2 that everyone is entitled to all rights and freedoms set in the declaration. And Article 5 states that nobody should get degrading treatment.The thing that confuses me is that the U.S was also part of this, but segregation did not end until 1964. Why is this?(2 votes)
- Many nations make grand pronouncements without intending to live up to them. It is also often the case that, when proclaiming something grand like "human Rights", a nation is blind to its own failure to live up to its words. I was once involved in a conversation with a young woman from Korea who proclaimed that she opposed capitalism. When I asked her if she hoped to work in a job that would, eventually, provide a pension upon retirement, she replied, "of course." When I asked if she intended the funds put aside to pay her pension should be "invested" or just "left in a bank safe", she said that they should be invested for maximum return, which made her a capitalist. Things are complicated.(2 votes)
- if it is supposed to be all about freedom nd equality why do certain nations have veto powers in the UN? why does it feel like this is just an official screen for the powerful nations to control the weaker ones but still be looking good? like the usa in ww1 used the pretext of "fighting for democracy" to enter ww1 and but like norris said if the us wanted to be neutral they would have confronted both britain and germany and would not have been supplying the allies, all in all i have this nagging suspicion that the UN gives more power to a select few nations and i feel like it is just a morally channeled way to subdue countries that the us or other major powers dont like, can someone explain how the UN is fair or has equality all around? would the un punish the us for its hypothetical offences the same way it would punish lets say a small and poor country which doesnt want democracy? and in the end who are the people who sit at those offices? i dont think they are selected by the whole world equally, or are they? furthermore what is stopping the people in power to let their own feelings and judgements affect their decisions?(2 votes)
- Why does no one follow this declaration still? I mean, it only takes a few minutes to find examples of these rights being ignored or outright violated. Russia and China are part of the UN, right? And there's a lot of religious suppression going on in places like France. Outlawing head scarfs and prayer in public is not freedom of expression or religion. It seems almost worse that there is a declaration at all if no one is going to follow it.(1 vote)
- The Declaration was promulgated at a time of high optimism. Many of the governments whose representatives voted for it thought it would be enforced OUTSIDE of their borders. The declaration had no attached enforcement policies.(2 votes)
- which countries voted against the UDHR?(0 votes)
- The Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948. Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained (USSR, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UKSSR), the BSSR, Yugoslavia, Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Africa) and Honduras and Yemen failed to vote or abstain.(0 votes)
- why in a story it said that there was over 15m-81m people that died by the holocaust is that true?(0 votes)
- 11 million people died actually...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/11-million-not-6-million-died-in-the-holocaust/2017/05/26/6fdcc270-3f1c-11e7-b29f-f40ffced2ddb_story.html
https://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/united-states/remember-the-11-million-why-an-inflated-victims-tally-irks-holocaust-historians(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Narrator] We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is an excerpt of the US
Declaration of Independence, and the United States goes
on with its constitution, which gets ratified in 1789,
to articulate a Bill of Rights, and many will point to The Enlightenment as the inspiration for these ideas. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the
Declaration of Independence, cited figures like Locke as
some of mankind's best thinkers, so at this early date,
nations were at least writing these types of words
into their Declarations of Independence, into their constitutions. But despite that, the 20th century is one of the bloodiest
centuries in human history. You have World War I, where
roughly 17 million people die. In World War II, 50 to
80 million people die, some directly because of the conflict, but many because of lack of
access to food and famine. The Chinese are particularly hit. Over 15 million died during
the Japanese occupation of China. This idea of genocide comes about, first with the Armenian genocide in the declining Ottoman Empire
where over a million people are believed to have been killed, and then in World War II,
you have the holocaust, where six to 11 million
people were killed, roughly two thirds of
the Jewish population in Europe and many others. The Russian empire and
eventually the Soviet Union gets especially hit hard in the first half of the 20th century. In World War I alone, three
million Russians died. Shortly after the war, you have
a significant Russian famine that killed five million people. Then in the early thirties,
you have the Soviet famine, five to seven million people. This is believed to have occurred because of Stalin's attempts to make agriculture collectivized. In the late thirties,
you have Stalin's purge, where he goes after political opponents, and it's believed that he killed as many as three million people. These things were so
shocking to the planet that they made attempts to
prevent them in the future. In 1920, out of the trauma of World War I, the League of Nations was founded. It was an attempt to prevent
things like this in the future, for nations to talk to each other and to coordinate so they don't go to war, especially at the scale
seen in World War I. But clearly, that was unsuccessful, and we have World War II
where even more people die, after which the slightly stronger United Nations gets founded, once again with the
charter of fostering dialog between nations so that we can prevent these types of trauma for the planet. Early on in the newly founded UN agenda was this idea of revisiting the ideas of The Enlightenment,
this idea of human rights, and trying to codify them
in international law. In 1948, you have the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that's drafted by the United Nations, and it was an attempt to
make a universal declaration of these rights that
all humans on the planet have access to. I'm going to give excerpts of it, and keep a lookout for things
that feel awfully close to ideas in the United States
Declaration of Independence, the US constitution, or
ideas from The Enlightenment. This is part of the preamble. Whereas recognition of
the inherent dignity and of the equal and unalienable rights of all members of the human
family is the foundation of freedom, justice,
and peace in the world. Whereas disregard and
contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outrage the
conscience of mankind. Remember World War II just happened. And the advent of a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and
want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration
of the common people. Now, therefore, the
general assembly proclaims this universal declaration of human rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. You might be thinking, "Why did they even have to write this?" Well, think about it. Things like the constitutions
of various countries, especially the United States, these only applied to those countries, but now there was an
attempt to write down, to codify something that would apply to all human beings, to the entire planet, and here's just some of the 30
articles to that declaration, to that Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with
reason and conscience and should act towards one another in the spirit of brotherhood. This really feels similar to
some of the ideas of Locke in The Enlightenment that we
talk about in other videos. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth
in this declaration, without distinction of
any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political, or other opinion,
national or social origin, property, birth, or other status. So this is interesting, because even though I start this video with the United States
Declaration of Independence and a discussion of the constitution, slavery in the United States would last for another 80 plus years after the Declaration of
Independence was written. Women didn't even have the right to vote until the early 20th century, so beyond this being a
universal declaration for the entire planet, the
attempt is also to make it clear that it needs to apply to everyone. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. No one shall be held in
slavery or servitude. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or
degrading treatment or punishment. Everyone charged with a
penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent
until proved guilty. Once again, ideas that seemed
very similar to what we see in constitutions like
that of the United States. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Everyone has the right to freedom
of opinion and expression. Very similar to the First
Amendment in the US constitution. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No one may be compelled to
belong to an association. And article 21 is especially interesting. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country directly or through freely chosen representatives. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government. So this is a big statement. It's taking a stand, saying
that everyone on the planet should be able to live in a democracy and participate in a democracy. The commission that drafted
this declaration was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife
of Franklin Roosevelt. This is a map of who
voted for this declaration and these are the countries in green. Who abstained, they
just decided not to vote for the declaration, those
are the countries in orange, and then you have a few
that voted against it. In gray are the countries
that weren't part of the United Nations at the time. An interesting question
looking at this map is to think about why certain
countries were willing to vote for it and why other countries decided to abstain at the time. These articles are talking about people having the right to
participate in a democracy, the right to be equal,
that all people are equal, and in many of these countries, people did not have equal rights. You had severe discrimination
in places like South Africa. In many of these countries,
you did not have a democracy, but there's a broader question here. It's nice to be able to write
these fairly idealistic ideas, but to what degree does it have an effect, and to what degree can
it actually be enforced? You might cite things like the American Civil Rights Movement, which
did echo some of these ideas that were made in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Maybe they helped the
civil rights movement, or maybe the civil rights
movement would've happened regardless of what the UN did. But at the same time, you
have ideas like apartheid. You have racism and
discrimination in South Africa from the beginning of colonial rule, but it was actually at the exact same time as this declaration that the
official policy of apartheid, of government-sanctioned discrimination, of government-sanctioned segregation, preventing racial
mingling came into effect and lasted all the way until 1991. And so one could make an argument, maybe things would've been worse without the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, or maybe the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights really wasn't in a situation to actually effect things like this. In many of the countries around the world, not just the orange ones but often in many of the green ones as well, you continued to see
things that go against those ideas of universal human rights. Even if the UN passes something and if one country doesn't
want to abide by it, what action can the other countries take? Economic action, maybe
sanctions, maybe military action, and to what degree are people
actually willing to do that?