When did the UN define human rights?
22116815#1
Human rights came into global discourse after the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This was the first global recognition that all humans are inherente United Nations endorsement of democracy had little to do with the UN's stance on development. Human rights became one of the major debates between the West and Communist states during the Cold War. Cold War dichotomy of right versus left defined power of the state and of the individual in aspects of society based on political affiliation. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet bloc left Western values and ideas, which remains one of the main ideologies of the world.
Rights-based approach to development
7062377#78
The UN adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations." The Soviet Union abstained from voting on adoption of the declaration. The US did not ratify the social and economic rights sections.
Aftermath of World War II
31899#0
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a historic document that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly at its third session on 10 December 1948 as Resolution 217 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France. Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained, and two did not vote.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
31899#15
The Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948 in Palais de Chaillot, Paris, as the third United Nations General Assembly was held there . Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favour, none against, eight abstained and Honduras and Yemen failed to vote or abstain.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
706186#7
In 1945, the United Nations Charter included the obligation "to promote... universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without discrimination as to race, sex, language, or religion". However, the Charter did not define these rights. Three years later, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first international legal document to delineate human rights; the UDHR does not mention reproductive rights. Reproductive rights began to appear as a subset of human rights in the 1968 Proclamation of Tehran, which states: "Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children".
Reproductive rights
20643298#13
In 2003, Brazil tabled a Resolution at the UN Commission on Human Rights, stressing that human rights apply to all human beings regardless of sexual orientation. The resolution was indefinitely deferred (the Commission itself ceased in 2006 when the UN replaced it with the Human Rights Council). Since 2008, the 34 member countries of the Organization of American States have unanimously approved a series of resolutions affirming that human rights protections extend to sexual orientation and gender identity. Since 2000, the UN General Assembly has included a reference to sexual orientation in its biennial resolutions on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, as did the former Commission on Human Rights. The latter had also addressed the use of the death penalty for sexual relations between consenting adults in its annual resolutions on the death penalty between 2002 and 2005.
LGBT rights at the United Nations
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In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) were adopted by the United Nations, between them making the rights contained in the UDHR binding on all states. However, they came into force only in 1976, when they were ratified by a sufficient number of countries (despite achieving the ICCPR, a covenant including no economic or social rights, the US only ratified the ICCPR in 1992). The ICESCR commits 155 state parties to work toward the granting of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) to individuals. 
Since then numerous other treaties (pieces of legislation) have been offered at the international level. They are generally known as "human rights instruments". Some of the most significant are:The United Nations (UN) is the only multilateral governmental agency with universally accepted international jurisdiction for universal human rights legislation. All UN organs have advisory roles to the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Human Rights Council, and there are numerous committees within the UN with responsibilities for safeguarding different human rights treaties. The most senior body of the UN with regard to human rights is the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The United Nations has an international mandate to:
Human rights
3164358#4
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was implemented on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations. Therefore, we have officially witnessed 68 years of the United Nations approaching human rights issues on a global scale. The declaration was created after the end of World War II and was the first worldwide acknowledgement of the rights each individual human being is entitled to. When the UDHR was first created the United Nations was only made up of 51 member states, but after the surge of decolonisation’s, beginning in the late 1940s, the UN is now made up of 193 nations. Since 1948, many Eastern Asian countries who were formally colonised have since achieved independence and have joined the UN, therefore acknowledging the UDHR and other major human rights treaties. There is currently no human rights body governing the Eastern Asian region, however the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012.
Human rights in East Asia
219877#29
The Paris Principles were defined at the first International Workshop on National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in Paris from 7 to 9 October 1991, and adopted by UN Human Rights Commission Resolution 1992/54 of 1992 and General Assembly Resolution 48/134 of 1993. The Paris Principles list a number of responsibilities for national human rights institutions.
International human rights law
35473263#13
An Appeal for Human Rights, published by Atlanta students in 1960, is cited as a key moment in beginning the wave of nonviolent direct actions that swept the American South. In 1967, less than a year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. began to argue that the concept of "civil rights" was laden with isolating, individualistic capitalist values. He said: "It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. When you deal with human rights you are not dealing with something clearly defined in the Constitution. They are rights that are clearly defined by the mandates of a humanitarian concern." For King, who began to organize the multi-racial Poor People's Campaign at the end of his life, human rights required economic justice in addition to de jure equality.
Human rights movement
35473263#10
The concept of human rights was indeed built into United Nations with institutions such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Active diplomacy by Latin American countries was instrumental to the process of promoting these ideas and drafting the relevant agreements. As a result of this pressure, more human rights language was adopted at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to create the UN Charter. Revelations about the Holocaust, followed by the Nuremberg Trials, also had a major influence on the movement, particularly among Jewish and Christian lobbying groups. Some NGO's represented the UN charter as a victory for the human rights movement, while other activists argued that it paid lipservice to human rights while basically serving the interests of the great powers.
Human rights movement
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In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, followed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the push for human rights action took on new impetus. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was formed in 1993 to oversee human rights issues for the UN, following the recommendation of that year's World Conference on Human Rights. Jacques Fomerand, a scholar of the UN, describes this organization's mandate as "broad and vague", with only "meagre" resources to carry it out. In 2006, it was replaced by a Human Rights Council consisting of 47 nations. Also in 2006, the General Assembly passed a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in 2011 it passed its first resolution recognizing the rights of LGBT people.
United Nations