Human Rights

We are living in an era of dramatic change and transition, in a world that is being transformed by complex financial systems and revolutionary information technologies into a vast global marketplace. Globalization is creating new patterns of interaction among people and States, promising unprecedented opportunities for material progress in larger freedom, but also threatening to compound many existing challenges before the international community while deepening the economic marginalization of those most vulnerable. In this complex scenario, human rights, which were embedded formally at the United Nations as a great international priority 50 years ago -- by means of the December 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- have gained prominence as a universally recognized set of norms and standards that increasingly inform all aspects of our relations as individuals and as collective members of groups, within communities and among nations. There is now near-universal recognition that respect for human rights -- the rights of political choice and association, of opinion and expression, and of culture; the freedom from fear and from all forms of discrimination and prejudice; freedom from want and the right to employment and well-being and, collectively, to development -- is essential to the sustainable achievement of the three agreed global priorities of peace, development and democracy.

Source: United Nations, Introduction to Human Rights Today