50 Fun Facts About Human Rights

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists rest, leisure and which workplace benefit as a right?

Paid holidays are a human right under Article 24, which demands 'reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay'. Article 26 of the same text makes elementary education compulsory and free.

Roughly how many languages carry the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from Abkhaz to Zulu?

More than 500 languages carry it — 577 at the UN's last count — making the declaration the most translated document in the world.

Which country is the only UN member that has never ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child?

The United States signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 but never ratified it, leaving it alone among UN members; the treaty defines a child as anyone under eighteen.

Which country was the last on Earth to abolish slavery, in 1981, and allowed slaveholders to be prosecuted only in 2007?

Mauritania abolished slavery by decree in 1981, yet the 2018 Global Slavery Index still estimated 90,000 people enslaved there, about two per cent of the population.

When Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire in 1833, who received the £20 million compensation?

The owners of enslaved people got the money, not the freed: the £20 million equalled 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual income, and the debt raised to fund it was only certainly extinguished in 2015.

The word 'refugee' entered English in the 1680s for which group fleeing France once the Edict of Nantes was revoked?

Huguenots — French Protestants stripped of legal protection in 1685 — were the first people called 'refugees' in English, the word coming from French réfugié, one who flees to a place of safety.

Under the Third Geneva Convention, a captured soldier need give only name, rank, date of birth and which other detail?

Serial number completes the list in Article 17, which adds that captives who refuse to say more may not be threatened or ill-treated for it, and no form of coercion may be used to extract more.

Which clay artefact in the British Museum did the last Shah of Iran call 'the world's first charter of human rights'?

The Cyrus Cylinder, dug up in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, dates from the 6th century BC, and a replica sits in a second-floor hallway of UN headquarters in New York.

Which country abolished the death penalty for all crimes in its 1864 constitution, the first surviving state to do so?

Venezuela beat San Marino to it by a year, and by 1900 only three countries in the world had abolished capital punishment for every crime.

Which group began in 1961 with an Observer article about two Portuguese students jailed for a toast to liberty?

Amnesty International grew from barrister Peter Benenson's article 'The Forgotten Prisoners'; the students had been given seven years, and the movement it started won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize.

Who shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with India's Kailash Satyarthi, two years after a Taliban gunman shot her?

Malala Yousafzai was 17 when she collected the prize, making her the youngest Nobel laureate ever; the shooting had happened on 9 October 2012 as she rode home from an exam in Pakistan's Swat Valley.

Whose 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was laid on an empty chair in Oslo while he served eleven years for 'inciting subversion'?

Liu Xiaobo, jailed over the Charter 08 democracy manifesto, never collected it: actress Liv Ullmann read his essay 'I Have No Enemies' at the ceremony, and he died of liver cancer in July 2017, weeks after being granted medical parole.

Which lawyer, sacked as a judge in Iran's 1979 revolution, became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Shirin Ebadi won in 2003, the first Iranian to receive the prize; she had been the first female president of the Tehran city court before being demoted to a clerk in the court she once ran.

What do the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wear when marching for children 'disappeared' by Argentina's 1976–83 junta?

White headscarves symbolise the nappies of their lost children and are embroidered with their names and dates of birth; the marches began outside the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on 30 April 1977.

Which Russian tax adviser, dead in a Moscow jail in 2009, lends his name to laws sanctioning individual rights abusers?

Sergei Magnitsky had exposed a tax fraud by Russian officials; the first Magnitsky Act passed in Washington in 2012, and a Moscow court then convicted him of tax evasion posthumously in 2013.

Where did the UN General Assembly adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its New York home still unbuilt?

Paris hosted the Assembly's third session at the Palais de Chaillot; the UN's Manhattan headquarters was not declared complete until October 1952.

Human Rights Day marks the anniversary of the 1948 vote adopting the Universal Declaration — on which date?

10 December is Human Rights Day because the General Assembly adopted the declaration that day in 1948, by 48 votes to none with eight abstentions.

How many articles make up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the last forbidding its use to destroy the rest?

30 articles run from Article 1's 'born free and equal in dignity and rights' to Article 30, which says nothing in the text gives any state, group or person a right to destroy the freedoms it lists.

The two 1966 UN covenants split the Universal Declaration's rights into civil and political rights and what else?

Economic, social and cultural rights fill one covenant and civil and political rights the other; with the declaration they form the 'International Bill of Human Rights', which came into force in 1976.

Which state abstained on the 1948 Universal Declaration over its articles on changing religion and equal marriage?

Saudi Arabia balked at Article 18's right 'to change his religion or belief' and Article 16 on marriage; the six communist abstainers complained instead that the text did not condemn fascism strongly enough.

Which Indian delegate replaced 'all men' with 'all human beings' in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration?

Hansa Mehta is widely credited with the change, made to better reflect gender equality; Article 1 now opens 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights'.

Which Canadian professor, the UN's first human rights division director, wrote the Universal Declaration's first draft?

John Humphrey, a McGill law professor who had lost his left arm in a childhood fire, prepared the preliminary draft after consulting the Commission's executive group chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Which French jurist, a co-author of the Universal Declaration, won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize on its 20th anniversary?

René Cassin also presided over the European Court of Human Rights from 1965 to 1968, and in 1987 his remains were moved to the crypt of the Panthéon.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was the first to protect which group, the first three covering only combatants?

Civilians in enemy hands or under occupation gained treaty protection only after the Second World War exposed the gap; all four 1949 conventions have since been ratified by 196 countries, more than belong to the UN.

The 1998 treaty founding the International Criminal Court is named for which city, where it was adopted on 17 July?

The Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002; more than 120 states are party to it, while China and India have neither signed nor acceded.

Which offence, ranked 'supreme' by the Nuremberg judges, came under the ICC's jurisdiction only in 2018?

Crime of aggression — starting an illegal war — was defined only at the 2010 Kampala review conference, and two-thirds of states parties voted to activate the court's jurisdiction on 17 July 2018.

The International Criminal Court's first-ever conviction, of Congo militia chief Thomas Lubanga in 2012, was for what?

Conscripting child soldiers under fifteen and using them in the Ituri fighting earned Lubanga a 14-year sentence, with his six years in detention since 2006 counted towards it.

Which sitting president was the first indicted by the International Criminal Court, in 2009, over the war in Darfur?

Omar al-Bashir's warrant listed five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes, with three counts of genocide added in 2010; a military coup finally ousted him in April 2019.

Which body, the UN's principal judicial organ, took The Gambia's case against Myanmar over the Rohingya in 2019?

The International Court of Justice sits in The Hague's Peace Palace, built with $1.5 million from Andrew Carnegie, and in January 2020 it ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya.

Which French city hosts the European Court of Human Rights, where any individual in 46 countries can file a case?

Strasbourg's court takes applications 'by any person, non-governmental organisation, or group of individuals' against its member states; Russia was expelled from the system in March 2022 after invading Ukraine.

The 1981 Dudgeon case, Europe's first human-rights ruling against criminalising gay sex, concerned which part of the UK?

Northern Ireland still criminalised male homosexual acts under an 1885 law when Belfast shipping clerk Jeff Dudgeon complained; the court found a breach of his private life, and decriminalisation followed in October 1982.

Which UN body first enforced the 1948 Genocide Convention, convicting former mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998?

The Rwanda tribunal, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, also ruled in Akayesu that rape and sexual assault count as acts of genocide when committed with intent to destroy a group.

Who became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes when the Yugoslavia tribunal indicted him in 1999?

Slobodan Milošević conducted his own defence at The Hague after his 2001 extradition and died of a heart attack in his cell in 2006 before the trial could conclude.

Whose 1998 arrest in London on a Spanish warrant led Britain's Law Lords to deny former heads of state immunity?

Augusto Pinochet was held for over a year under judge Baltasar Garzón's universal-jurisdiction warrant before Britain let him fly home to Chile on health grounds in March 2000.

In 1915 the Allies first accused a government of 'crimes against humanity', over Ottoman massacres of which people?

Armenians were being deported and killed across the Ottoman Empire when Britain, France and Russia issued their note on 24 May 1915, and a 1948 UN report cited it as a precedent for the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.

Which kind of group did the Soviet Union keep out of the 1948 Genocide Convention's definition of protected victims?

Political groups were dropped because the USSR and others refused to accept that destroying people for their opinions or social status counted; the treaty protects only 'national, ethnical, racial or religious' groups.

Which Polish-Jewish lawyer coined the word 'genocide' in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe?

Raphael Lemkin built the word from genos ('family, clan, tribe, race') and -cide ('killing'), then lobbied the UN until the 1948 convention adopted many of his proposals.

Which principle in the 1951 Refugee Convention bars sending a refugee back to where their life or freedom is threatened?

Non-refoulement, from the French for pushing back, is now seen as customary international law that binds even states that never signed the convention.

The writ of habeas corpus, which makes a jailer bring a detainee before a judge, literally means what in Latin?

'That you have the body' is the command to the custodian; the procedure was first codified by England's Habeas Corpus Act 1679 after court rulings had blunted the writ.

The word 'asylum', literally 'an inviolable place' safe from seizure, ultimately comes from which ancient language?

Greek asylon meant 'refuge, fenced territory', joining a- ('without') to sylē ('right of seizure'); Article 14 of the UDHR promises everyone the right 'to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution'.

What term did Peter Benenson's 1961 Observer article coin for people jailed for opinions that did not advocate violence?

Prisoner of conscience covered anyone 'physically restrained' from expressing an honestly held opinion; in 1995 the definition was widened to people jailed over their ethnicity, sexuality or gender.

Human Rights Watch began in 1978 as a 'Watch' committee named for which city, where a 1975 East–West accord was signed?

Helsinki Watch monitored Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords; Americas, Asia and Middle East Watch committees followed, and in 1988 they merged as Human Rights Watch.

Which Geneva body, its members elected to three-year terms, replaced a discredited UN commission in 2006?

The Human Rights Council, like the commission it replaced, has been 'strongly criticized for including member countries that engage in human rights abuses'; its 47 seats are shared out by regional group.

Which 1979 UN treaty, often called an international bill of rights for women, is policed by a committee of 23 experts?

CEDAW — the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women — has been ratified by 189 states; its committee of 23 is chosen for expertise in women's issues.

Which 1984 UN treaty says 'no exceptional circumstances whatsoever', not even war, may justify the practice it outlaws?

The Convention against Torture came into force on 26 June 1987, a date now marked as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture; a committee of experts monitors compliance.

Which French playwright issued a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791 and was guillotined two years later?

Olympe de Gouges wrote that a woman 'has the right to mount the scaffold' and so 'must equally have the right to mount the speaker's platform'; the Revolutionary Tribunal granted her only the first.

Who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and died eleven days after giving birth to Frankenstein's author?

Mary Wollstonecraft held that women 'are not naturally inferior to men but appeared to be only because they lack education'; the daughter she died bearing grew up to write Frankenstein as Mary Shelley.

Which country's 1996 constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation?

South Africa's section 9(3) bars discrimination on race, gender, sexual orientation and other grounds; in 2006 it became the fifth country in the world, and still the only one in Africa, to legalise same-sex marriage.

Which 46-nation body, often confused with the European Union, runs the European Court of Human Rights?

The Council of Europe, founded by the 1949 Treaty of London, is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation; Russia became the first country ever expelled from it, after invading Ukraine in 2022.

Which country hosts the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, set up in 1979 and first ruling against Honduras in 1988?

Costa Rica's capital San José holds the court, which found Honduras liable in Velásquez-Rodríguez for failing to investigate a forced disappearance; it enforces the American Convention on Human Rights.