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https://medium.com/@HillaryClinton/human-rights-are-universal-c628f3d797d5>
"December 10th is the 75th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and once again we are in the midst of a debate about whether it
declares Western or universal values. Based on our experiences around the
world, we believe strongly that the human rights enshrined in the
Declaration
are in fact truly universal. They belong to everyone, everywhere. And, an
analysis of how the
Declaration was created shows clearly that it arose from
a global debate in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War as
nations struggled to reconcile sovereignty with security and international law
with human rights.
The world had never experienced trauma of that scale. Forty-five million
civilians and fifteen million soldiers killed. Twenty-five million soldiers
wounded, and forty-five million civilians injured. More than eleven million
murdered and tortured in concentration camps. Fifty-plus million refugees
jammed in camps across Europe. And atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
As the Secord World War drew to a close, the so-called “Great Powers” — the
United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia — convened at Dumbarton
Oaks in Washington, DC, to design an international organization that would
succeed where the League of Nations had failed. The delegates from those
nations were focused solely on security not the values leaders had proclaimed
they were defending and promoting throughout the war.
That omission was noted by others, and an effort led by Latin American nations,
New Zealand, Greece, and India, as well as anti-colonial activists and women’s
rights, civil rights, and religious organizations was organized to elevate
attention to the values they thought should undergird postwar planning. They
held regional conferences in Mexico City and Paris, convened global coalitions,
drafted their own declarations of rights, and flooded the Great Powers with
demands to revise their plans and build a United Nations as dedicated to
securing human rights as it was to preventing war."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
