Human rights in East Asia
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was implemented on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations. Therefore, we have officially witnessed 68 years of the United Nations approaching human rights issues on a global scale. The declaration was created after the end of World War II and was the first worldwide acknowledgement of the rights each individual human being is entitled to. When the UDHR was first created the United Nations was only made up of 51 member states, but after the surge of decolonisation’s, beginning in the late 1940s, the UN is now made up of 193 nations. Since 1948, many Eastern Asian countries who were formally colonised have since achieved independence and have joined the UN, therefore acknowledging the UDHR and other major human rights treaties. There is currently no human rights body governing the Eastern Asian region, however the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) issued the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012.
Nabeel Rajab
With the ending of the oppressive State Security Law period in 2000, Rajab was able to begin working openly in the field of Human rights as one of the founders of the Bahrain Human Rights Society, one of the first human rights organizations in Bahrain. He subsequently fell out with some of the other founders. In 2002, following wide ranging political reforms by the Bahraini government which allowed independent human rights groups to operate, Rajab worked with Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and others to found the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), a nonprofit non-governmental organization which works to promote human rights in Bahrain. Rajab was Training Program Officer and Senior Researcher at BCHR. He later became Vice President and Head of International Relations until he later took over from Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja as BCHR president, a position he still held as of August 2012. In 2011, he along with Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja and Khalid Ibrahim founded the Gulf Centre for Human Rights. Rajab became the president of the newly founded rights group, and remains a Founding Director.