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.
Centre for Human Rights
The Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria Faculty of Law, South Africa, is an organisation dedicated to promoting human rights on the continent of Africa. The Centre, founded in 1986, promotes human rights through educational outreach, including multinational conferences, seminars and publications such as "Human Rights Law in Africa", "The African Human Rights Law Journal", the "African Human Rights Law Reports" and "The Constitutional Law of South Africa". The Centre, which was founded during Apartheid, assisted in adapting a Bill of Rights for South Africa and contributed to creating the South African Constitution. In 2006, the Centre received the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education, particular recognising for the LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa and the African Human Rights Moot Court Competition.