Diplomats and human rights campaigners have gathered in Paris to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN human rights declaration. Born out of the trauma of World War II, the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shaped modern concepts of human dignity and served as a template for international rights conventions that followed. Ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor Stéphane Hessel read out its preamble before a gathering of European and United Nations officials, artists and rights groups in a solemn ceremony near the Eiffel Tower, where the convention was adopted on 10 December 1948.
"Still today, it is a text worth reading. It is perfectly relevant. All the more so because it has not been upheld - and it is asking us to fight for it," said Hessel, who helped draft the declaration. "We live in a world that tramples on human rights all the time."
Based on France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, the 30-point non-binding text was adopted by 58 UN states, with the atrocities of World War II fresh in their minds. Article 1 of the text proclaims: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
Hessel said that the election of Barack Obama as US president was an indicator of the progress on the equality front. "Pessimists say things are getting worse and worse, that the world is a terrible place but there has never been so much progress in 60 years," he said. "We created a united Europe, we got rid of apartheid, we ended the Soviet Union and its gulags, we set up the International Criminal Tribunal to try rogue heads of state."
