Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Research papers on international politics can be written on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Paper Masters has writers that are experts on human rights issues and will custom write on any nations human rights violations or policy.

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since that time, the United Nations has expanded human rights law to encompass many minority and other groups including women, children, disabled persons, and migrant workers. As given in the Declaration, these groups are protected against discriminatory practices. Regardless of societal norms, these laws extend certain rights to people that have established "universality, indivisibility, and interrelatedness with development and democracy".

In the Preamble, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state that all members of the human race belong to one family, and as such, each individual is entitled to the same rights and freedoms as the next. The Preamble makes note that the "disregard and contempt" of human rights around the world has "resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind". Since the codes inception, many nations and individuals have been accused of disregarding human rights including China, Russia, the United States and nations of the Middle East. Acts of mass murder and genocide have been reported in the following country:

• Liberia
• Iraq
• Haiti
• Sierra Leone
• East Timor
• Somalia
• Rwanda
• Kosovo
• Bosnia

In many of these cases the U.N. has been criticized for acting to late, and in some cases, for not acting at all. As given by these examples, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights offers protection only when these rights are enforced by the member states of the United Nations.

To some degree, the acceptance of international standards on rights is a revival of aspects of the natural law model, which presupposes the existence of inalienable rights common to all humanity. The more modern model, however, does not speak of rights as deriving from divine authority, but rather suggests that rights are fundamental to the fact that human existence demands equality. This is the essence of the human rights theory of rights. It does not, however, span a full gamut of rights that can be found in some societies.The United Kingdom, for example, has evolved a complex tradition of the nature, extent and application of rights. International declarations and treaties serve more to affirm that which already exists rather than to establish a new norm. In addition, in the modern concept, it is up to the state to secure and protect rights in a process that can be defined in terms of each society's norms.The main caveat is to prevent these norms from transgressing or infringing on the rights agreed upon by humanity as a whole. All of the various theories regarding rights argue for the nature of rights in a different way and have different implications for analyzing their source, nature and application.Each theory was a product of the specific social and historical context in which it was developed, and which in turn had an influence on succeeding theories of rights.Because of this process that intertwines many cultural threads, an analytical approach that tends to parse specific elements of rights in order to reach an understanding has a great deal of difficulty identifying the precise elements of moral, legal and political rights.