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.
Communication rights
The concept of the right to communicate began in 1969 with Jean D’Arcy, a pioneer in French and European television in the 1950s and by 1969 Director of the United Nations Radio and Visual Services Division, where he was involved in international policy discussions arising out of the recent innovations in satellite global communications. He recognized that the communication rights relating to freedom of expression embodied in the U. N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948 would need to be re-examined in the context of global, interactive communication between individuals and communities. He called for the need for the recognition of a human right to communicate that would encompass earlier established rights. He thus was the first to link communication and "universal" human rights. His call was taken up by academics, policy experts, and public servants who evolved into the Right to Communicate Group, the many non-governmental and civil society organisations that made up the Platform for Co-operation on Communication and Democratisation, and the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) Campaign.