Submitted by: Matthew Perry, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, John Jay College
Click here to read: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
“I have found that students often use the language of “rights” when discussing the concepts of justice and (especially) injustice. This document is a valuable tool for getting students to think precisely about the concept of human rights, and the historical development of these ideas. The very idea of “human” rights supposes that these rights always have (or should have) existed. This claim, inherent to the document, could be discussed by students: Have some rights always existed, even if not honored? Or are rights necessarily specific to the time and place of their articulation? Will new human rights be discovered or invented in next centuries and millennium? It’s useful to have students consider what is mentioned in the original declaration, and what is left out. Students can then discuss how this document helps to define or explain the concept of justice.” (Comment by Perry, 2019)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued by the United Nations in 1948. It is an important document because it represents a global (although there’s room for discussion of this point given the limited African and Asian membership in the UN at the time) effort to establish a common understanding of what constitutes “human rights”—a critical issue in modern understandings of justice.
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