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Many of the major problems we face today require international co-operation, so we need international commissions, conferences and organisations to solve these problems.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of these international operations. Spurred on the bloodshed and horror of the Second World War, the nations planned the details of an international organisation, the United Nations, which would work for a better and more peaceful future. A United Nations Charter, defining the purposes, principles, methods and structures of the new organisation, was signed by fifty nations in 1945.
Because of the inhumanity in the Second World War, the international protection of human rights was seen as one essential precondition of world peace. In 1946, the United Commission on Human Rights was founded to prepare an \"international bill of rights\".
The Commission worked out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, as \"a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations\".
Before 1948, a person was subjected to the laws of the nation. If those laws violated her or his rights, there was no internationally accepted organisation to help these people. With the Declaration of the Human Rights, the rights of a person are established regardless of what the law of the nation says. So it overrules the national laws.
2.1 International Covenants on Human Rights
On 16 December 1966, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights were adopted by the UN General Assembly. The Universal Declaration and the two Covenants make up the International Bill of Rights.
The two Covenants differ from the Universal Declaration in a number of ways. They introduce a new right, the right of all peoples and nations to \"self-determination\". They also set up machinery for the international supervision of human rights, the Human Rights Committee.
Since 1966, more than 60 nations ratified the Bill of Rights.
2.2 Helsinki Conference
The Helsinki Conference was held in 1975, on Security and Co-operation in Europe between countries of the West and the Eastern bloc. During this conference, the Western countries wanted the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies to agree to reunite families and to permit freer contact between people living on either side of the Iron Curtain. They also demanded that the Eastern bloc countries sign a human rights pact.
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