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.
Bahey Hassan
Bahey eldin Hassan is an Egyptian human rights defender and one of the founders of the Egyptian human rights movement in the 1980s. Hassan currently serves as the Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), which he cofounded in 1993. In 2014, and after receiving death threats for his human rights work, Hassan had to leave Egypt and currently lives in self-imposed exile in France.
Hassan is also a journalist, lecturer, author and editor of several published articles, papers and books on human rights and democratic transformation in the Arab region.