A different Human Rights Day in 2025
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, and set out for the first time fundamental human rights to be universally protected.
Human Rights Day has been observed around the world on December 10 ever since.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the declaration on Wednesday.
“The UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law,” she said. “More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.”
“The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment” she said. “Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.”
Last year, President Biden issued a Human Rights Day proclamation saying in part: “Today and this week, may we reaffirm our commitment to standing up for human rights at home and around the world. The future will be won by those who unleash the full potential of their people to live with dignity, prosper, think freely, innovate, and exist and love openly without fear.”
The State Department bestowed the Human Rights Defender Award on eight people who have defended migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women and democracy. The recipients were from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia and Azerbaijan.
The U.S. government didn’t recognize Human Rights Day this year, Richardson said.
Instead, a Reuters article published Wednesday said that the Trump administration wants the International Criminal Court to amend its founding document to ensure it doesn’t investigate Trump and his top officials, and it’s threatening new U.S. sanctions on the court if it doesn’t do so.
The Trump official who was the source for the article didn’t say what issues the administration worries could be the subject of an ICC investigation. But the official referred to “open chatter” in the international legal community that the court could target Trump and his top officials in 2029, when the Trump’s term ends.
“Trump’s adversaries caught him by surprise with their lawfare campaign during and after his first term. With the ICC, he has a chance to strike pre-emptively,” wrote Eugene Kontorovich, a law professor and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in an October opinion article in The Wall Street Journal.
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