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.
Ecumenical Center for Human Rights
The Ecumenical Center for Human Rights (Centre Oecumenique des Droits de L'Homme) is a human rights organisation founded in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1979 to monitor the situation in Haiti under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. The center became a leading critic of the abject living conditions of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, known as "Braceros". When in 1980, the center's Director was barred from Dominican Republic, its activities were transferred to San Juan, Puerto Rico. From 1986 onwards it has been based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.