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.
Louis Henkin
While teaching at Columbia Law School starting in the early 1960s and through the Justice and Society Program of the Aspen Institute, Henkin specialized in the development and instruction of human rights law, which he put into practice by establishing the university's Center for the Study of Human Rights in 1978 and creating the Human Rights Institute in 1998. Elisa Massimino, president and chief executive officer of Human Rights First, the nonpartisan organization originally formed by Henkin as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said that he "literally and figuratively wrote the book on human rights" and that "[i]t is no exaggeration to say that no American was more instrumental in the development of human rights law than Lou".