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.
Clemens Nathan Research Centre
The Clemens Nathan Research Centre (CNRC) is a human rights organisation that focuses on organising international conferences with speakers from multidisciplinary fields and on publishing edited books and conference proceedings. It was founded in 2004 when Clemens N. Nathan (1933-2015, and the Centre's first chairman) was persuaded to start a research centre as an arm of the Consultative Council of Jewish Organisations. Whilst Nathan's career was in textiles, he worked for numerous Jewish causes, as well as international Human Rights and interfaith relations. Nathan was described by the Human Rights NGO Rene Cassin as "the human of human rights". The CNRC's first director is Alan Stephens. Leif Holmstrom, from the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund, described the CNRC as having succeeded "in launching and sustaining useful and constructive events and programmes which have had a beneficial and measurable impact on the improvement of Human Rights.". The CNRC has "stimulated and facilitated discussion, research and study on a striking array of topics, including international organisations, Human Rights, interfaith relations and the Holocaust and German-Jewish history".