On December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the General Assembly. It was a solemn pledge with humanity. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the session, hoped that the Declaration would become ‘the Magna Carta for all mankind’.

The immaculate premise of the Declaration is that human rights are not conferred as gifts by the state. An individual has human rights by reason of his or her being a member of the human family. These inherent rights were possessed anterior to the enactment of human rights instruments and constitutions whose object is to protect and promote human rights. The Declaration rejects the doctrine of the absoluteness of the state. Its philosophy is that there are limits to a state’s interference with the human rights of its citizens. Thanks to the Declaration and the enactment of the 1966 international human rights Covenants drawing inspiration from the Declaration and the evolution of human rights jurisprudence, a state’s treatment of its own people is not exclusively the internal affair of a state. It is a matter of legitimate concern of the international community which cannot remain silent in cases where there is state-sanctioned systematic policy and a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights. The ghost of domestic jurisdiction has now been exorcised although some rogue states still passionately invoke it as a cover for their human rights violations.

The central theme of the Declaration is that human rights rest on human dignity. The first Preamble of the Declaration recognises “the inherent dignity of all members of the human family” and in the fourth Preamble reaffirms its faith “in the dignity and worth of the human person”.

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