From Gaza to Ukraine, what would the pioneers of human rights think of our world today?
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The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the most vulnerable: we must fight to defend and extend it.
By Philippe Sands
During the week when we mark 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, I have been thinking about the genesis of both events and how we should commemorate them now.
Adopted within 24 hours of each other in Paris in December 1948, the Universal Declaration seeks to protect individuals, while the Convention seeks to protect groups. That moment in Paris was revolutionary: a recognition that the rights of the state are not unlimited, that the days of being allowed as a matter of law to trample over human lives were over.
How does it feel? I go back to that period around 1945, to the publication of two books, by two men whose origins and ideas may be traced to the remarkable city of Lviv, and to the law faculty of its university. One was Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by Rafael...
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