The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century: A Living Document in a Changing World

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a monumental embodiment for our time of the ancient idea that we all belong to a single global community, and that each human being has moral ties and responsibilities to all others. From the start, endorsed and adopted in 1948 by most Member States of the UN, the Declaration has been a beacon and a standard, its influence both wide and deep. The UDHR has been and is an unprecedented educational and cultural force, making people conversant with the idea of human rights, providing a widely accepted text enumerating those rights, delivering an articulate focus for what might otherwise be timid and inarticulate concerns, and sending out a message that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Today, the UDHR, translated into 350 languages, is the best-known and most often cited human rights document on Earth. By setting out, for the first time, fundamental rights to be universally protected, it is a milestone in the history of human interactions and the cause of human rights.