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.
Human rights in Tunisia
In July 2011, the UN opened its first human-rights office in north Africa. “The whole world watched with amazement and growing respect as Tunisians kept demanding your rights, refusing to be cowed by the repression, the arrests, the torture and all the injuries and tragic loss of life that occurred,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said at the official opening of the office. “The impact of these actions, on Tunisia itself, on the wider region, and indeed all across the world is hard to measure and is far from completed. But it has unquestionably been enormous and truly inspirational.” She noted that in the previous three weeks, Tunisia had ratified four major treaties: the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearances, and the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.