The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) together form the International Bill of Rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. While it is not a treaty with legal force, the document provides the underlying framework of rights from which all of the other human rights conventions that have followed are based and does have significant moral force.
• is a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966, and in force from March 23, 1976. It commits its parties to respect the civil and political rights of individuals, including the right to life, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, electoral rights and rights to due process and a fair trial.
• commits its parties to work toward the granting of economic, social, and cultural rights to individuals, including labor rights and the right to health, the right to education, and the right to an adequate standard of living. As of July 2011, the Covenant had 160 parties.[1] A further six countries had signed, but not yet ratified the Covenant.
• multilateral treaties adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enter into force when ratified by 20 member states which means that ratifying member states are obligated by international law to abide by the articles of the convention.
• a ground-breaking treaty defining and condemning racial discrimination. Calling for national measures towards the advancement of specific racial or ethnic groups, the Convention also makes the dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or inspiring racial hatred punishable by law.
• specifies measures for the advancement and empowerment of women in private and public life, particularly in the areas of education, employment, health, marriage and the family.
• the most universally ratified human rights Convention. Only two Member States, the United States and Somalia, are not yet parties to the Convention which, among many other things, makes education, at least through the primary grades, a right and protects children from economic and sexual exploitation.
• bans torture and rape as weapons of war. In 1998, in a major effort to help torture victims and to step up international attempts to end torture, the United Nations declared 26 June as the annual International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
• comprise four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment of the victims of war. The singular term Geneva Convention denotes the agreements of 1949, negotiated in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–45), which updated the terms of the first three treaties (1864, 1906, 1929), and added a fourth treaty. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols are at the core of international humanitarian law, the body of international law that regulates the conduct of armed conflict and seeks to limit its effects. They specifically protect people who are not taking part in the hostilities (civilians, health workers and aid workers) and those who are no longer participating in the hostilities, such as wounded, sick and shipwrecked soldiers and prisoners of war.
• The Hague Conventions were two international treaties negotiated at international peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands: The First Hague Conference in 1899 and the Second Hague Conference in 1907. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the nascent body of secular international law.
• defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” and requires states parties to suppress and punish acts of apartheid.
• is an international convention that defines who is a refugee, and sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. The convention also sets out which people do not qualify as refugees, such as war criminals. The Convention also provides for some visa-free travel for holders of travel documents issued under the convention.
• defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of years of campaigning by lawyer Raphael who coined the word “genocide” in 1944 and cited the 1915 annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260 and entered into force on January 12, 1951. All participating countries are advised to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. The number of states that have ratified the convention is currently 140.
• is an international human rights instrument of the United Nations and intended to prevent forced disappearance. The text was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 December 2006 and opened for signature on February 6, 2007. It entered into force on December 23, 2010. 88 states have signed the convention (which closed for signature upon entry into force) and as of May 2011, 27 have ratified or acceded.
• is an international human rights instrument of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. Parties to the Convention are required to promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities and ensure that they enjoy full equality under the law.
The text was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 13, 2006 and opened for signature on March 30, 2007. Following ratification by the 20th party, it came into force on May 3, 2008. As of July 2011, it has 149 signatories and 102 parties, and the European Union ‘concluded’ the treaty (in effect, ratified it to the extent responsibilities of the member states were transferred to the European Union) on December 23, 2010.
• is an international agreement governing the protection of migrant workers and families. Signed on December 18, 1990, it entered into force on July 1, 2003 after the threshold of 20 ratifying States was reached in March 2003. The Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW) monitors implementation of the convention, and is one of the seven UN-linked Human rights treaty bodies.
In 2005, the number of international migrants was between 185 and 192 million. This represents approximately three percent of the world population, comparable to the population of Brazil. Nearly all countries are concerned by migration, whether as sending, transit, or receiving countries, or as a combination of these. International migration has become an intrinsic feature of globalization.
• Today, the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (C107), established in 1957 with a primary focus of recognizing and protecting the cultural, religious, civil and social rights of indigenous and tribal populations within an independent country, and providing a standard framework for addressing the economic issues that many of these groups face is considered outdated in the protection of indigenous rights by the International Labor Organization (ILO).
In 1989, the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (C169) was written with the purpose of revising C107. The new convention has been ratified by twenty countries, including some that denounced the 1957 convention. In the body of the more recent convention, we read, “[…] Considering that the developments which have taken place in international law since 1957, as well as developments in the situation of indigenous and tribal peoples in all regions of the world, have made it appropriate to adopt new international standards on the subject with a view to removing the assimilationist orientation of the earlier standards […]”
This Convention is a forerunner of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in September of 2007 and is currently in the ratification process.
• while not a convention with actual legal force of a treaty, it was written for reinforcing the implementation of human rights under the auspices of the UNESCO and the interest of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights and was proclaimed in 1998 “to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”(UDHR) in the city of Valencia. Therefore it is also known as the Valencia Declaration. After fifty years from the adoption of the UDHR and following human rights instruments, the point of departure of the DHDR Preamble is the shared concern regarding the lack of political will for global enforcement of human rights. Moreover, the DHDR takes into account the new challenges of the global scenario for translating semantically rights into duties and responsibilities.
This declaration was passed by the UN General Assembly in December, 2011 and affirms the obligation of all nations to educate their citizens about human rights.