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 movement
The concept of human rights was indeed built into United Nations with institutions such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Active diplomacy by Latin American countries was instrumental to the process of promoting these ideas and drafting the relevant agreements. As a result of this pressure, more human rights language was adopted at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to create the UN Charter. Revelations about the Holocaust, followed by the Nuremberg Trials, also had a major influence on the movement, particularly among Jewish and Christian lobbying groups. Some NGO's represented the UN charter as a victory for the human rights movement, while other activists argued that it paid lipservice to human rights while basically serving the interests of the great powers.