Human+Rights+UN

The United Nations is the place where countries discuss human rights.

Shortly after it was formed, the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). A copy of this declaration is found here.

In 1966, the General Assembly passed two further documents describing how member states planned to bring human rights to the lives their citizens. These documents are the Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. As the names of these conventions suggests, human rights have been grouped into two different types. The power point below gives more details about these divisions.

The UN has also created the Human Rights Council, a smaller collection of countries which discusses the details of how to make the conventions a reality. The following report from the Human Rights Council contains a nice summary of the history of the UN and human rights.

This is a link to the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families. The document was passed over 20 years ago, in 1990. A good point to debate would be: has the treaty been effective?

Remember, the Convention calls for the creation of a committee of experts who will accept reports every five years from each member state. Also, individual people can present their case to the committee.

A global campaign was launched in 1998 to publicize this treaty and get more countries to ratify it. Working together on this campaign are the following organizations:



The following links are to other parts of the treaty, UN Organizations, and NGOs that work on this topic.
 * Organizations that relate to the convention || UN Organizations || NGOs ||
 * The committee - this page is the source of the document above || the Global Migration Group (GMG) - group of 14 UN organizations working together on the topic of migration || Migrant Forum in Asia - one of the groups that is part of the committee, their site is full of the latest news and issues related to migrants ||
 * the list of countries who have ratified the convention || an annual meeting called GFMD - organized by the GMG, these meetings address current issues facing migrant (HINT: search here for clauses to add to your resolution) || Migrant Rights International - this site is a little older, it doesn't seem to be updated since 2008, but it does have some nice phrasing of the issues and a few interesting statistics ||
 * ||  || Human Rights Watch - one of the oldest human rights organizations, it carries out a lot investigations, so its website will be full of anecdotes and statistics. It might be difficult to reach this site at times. ||

Questions regarding human rights that have been discussed at conferences and by the United Nations. 1. The Freedom of Access to Information. With the increase in access to the internet, the Human Rights Council has recently studied whether or not this access is a basic human right. The Council decided that it is a basic human right and explains it conclusion in the report below. The council has also released an analysis of ways in which people can access information.

The following [|blog] analyzes a response by one of the vice-presidents of Google, a so called father of the internet, who argues that the right of access to information is not a basic human right.

Here is an [|article by a human rights expert] which discusses this issue in terms of the traditional view on human rights. There are many great points for resolutions inside this article. The article is from the magazine called "The Interdependent," which is published by the United Nations Association of the USA.