United Nations Human Rights Council
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is a United Nations body whose mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world. The Council has 47 members elected for staggered three-year terms on a regional group basis. The headquarters of the Council are at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland.
The Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room is the meeting room of the United Nations Human Rights Council, in the Palace of Nations in Geneva.
Protest at UN against China's re-election in the Human Rights Council
Saudi Arabian-led airstrikes in Yemen, June 2015. Saudi Arabia is operating without a UN mandate.
Human rights are moral principles, or norms, for certain standards of human behaviour and are regularly protected as substantive rights in substantive law, municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable, fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being" and which are "inherent in all human beings", regardless of their age, ethnic origin, location, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They are regarded as requiring empathy and the rule of law, and imposing an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others; it is generally considered that they should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances.
Magna Carta or "Great Charter" was one of the world's first documents containing commitments by a sovereign to his people to respect certain legal rights.
U.S. Declaration of Independence ratified by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by the National Assembly of France, 26 August 1789
"It is not a treaty... [In the future, it] may well become the international Magna Carta." Eleanor Roosevelt with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949.