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 City
After the establishment of Rosario as the first Human Rights City back in 1997, other local authorities in South America effectively embraced the human rights-based approach by placing a special emphasis on its link with the notion of right to the city. In 2001, the City Statue of Brazil offered a renewed framework for promoting human rights and the social function of the city at a national scale. Mexico City is also among the pioneers in the development of the human rights cities notion: in the last decade, it has promoted the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City, created mechanisms to monitor human rights at the local level and adopted a new constitution specifically based on the human rights approach. The city of Bogotá was also at the forefront in the implementation of the human rights approach, with the implementation of the Bogotá Humana policy (2013-2016) which took a specific emphasis on the rights of homeless people, women and elderly population.