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
Since the 1970s the human rights movement has played an increasingly important role on the international scene. Although government support for human rights decreased, international organizations increased in strength and number. Some of the events of the 1970s, which gave global prominence to the human movements issue, included the abuses of Chilean Augusto Pinochet and American Richard Nixon administrations; the signing of the Helsinki Accords (1975) between the West and the USSR; the Soweto riots in South Africa; awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International (1977); and the emergence of the Democracy Wall movement in China. Nixon was succeeded by the Jimmy Carter administration, much more supportive of the human rights issues. Even before Carter made human rights central to his foreign policy, progressives in Congress had institutionalized human rights in the State Department and passed legislation tying human rights to foreign aid considerations.