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.
Article 19
Shortly before his death in 1984, J. Roderick MacArthur established a vision for Article 19 as a global human rights organization that would focus on censorship issues. His son Greg MacArthur, director of the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, set the wheels in motion for the creation of the organization inspired by an Article from the Universal Declaration of Human rights. Through Aryeh Neier—a lawyer and human rights leader who was formerly the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1970–1978) before founding Human Rights Watch in 1978 -- Martin Ennals was appointed to realize the idea. Ennals brought his experience from UNESCO, the National Council for Civil Liberties, and the Nobel Prize-winning Amnesty International, and started the Article 19 organization in 1986 with a budget around $1,500,000 and a staff of eight with its first executive director Kevin Boyle.