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.
Medical Committee for Human Rights
The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) was a group of American health care professionals that initially organized in June 1964 to provide medical care for civil rights workers, community activists, and summer volunteers working in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" project. Tightly associated with the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. notably addressed the 1966 MCHR convention. The organization remained active for years afterward in terms of fighting for disadvantaged Americans to have expanded access to health services, becoming a part of the "new left".