Human Rights Trivia
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100 free Human Rights trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Human rights law is younger than most people think. The Universal Declaration was voted through in 1948 by delegates who had just lived through a world war, and the binding treaties, international courts and watchdog groups that give it teeth mostly arrived decades later — some within living memory. These 100 questions follow that story: the drafting of the declaration and the covenants that made it law, the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war, the courts and tribunals from The Hague to the regional systems, the cases that set precedents, the campaigners who won Nobel prizes or died in custody, and the vocabulary — refugee, asylum, genocide, habeas corpus — that the whole field is built on. Play it as a ten-question round, use it for a civics or law class, or print it for a quiz night. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the headline left out.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists rest, leisure and which workplace benefit as a right?
Paid holidays
Paid holidays. Article 24 asks for 'periodic holidays with pay', and a binding UN covenant of 1966 went further by adding pay for public holidays.
Q 02Guinness World Records has certified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the world's most what?
Translated document
Translated document. The declaration binds no state the way a treaty does, yet it has been put into more than 500 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu.
Q 03Which country is the only UN member that has never ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child?
United States
United States. It helped draft the convention and signed it in 1995, yet it became the last UN member outside the treaty once Somalia ratified in 2015.
Q 04Which country was the last on Earth to abolish slavery, in 1981, and allowed slaveholders to be prosecuted only in 2007?
Mauritania
Mauritania banned slavery by decree in 1981 but passed no criminal law to enforce it, and tens of thousands of people were still living in bondage decades later.
Q 05When Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire in 1833, who received the £20 million compensation?
The owners
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.
Q 06The word 'refugee' entered English in the 1680s for which group fleeing France once the Edict of Nantes was revoked?
Huguenots
Huguenots. About 50,000 of these French Protestants settled in England, where their weavers set up a major industry in and around London's Spitalfields.
Q 07Under the Third Geneva Convention, a captured soldier need give only name, rank, date of birth and which other detail?
Serial number
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.
Q 08Which clay artefact in the British Museum did the last Shah of Iran call 'the world's first charter of human rights'?
Cyrus Cylinder
Cyrus Cylinder. Historians read it as royal propaganda and call the charter label an anachronism, yet in 1971 the Shah's sister presented a replica to the United Nations in New York.
Q 09In the 1860s Venezuela became the first surviving country to abolish which punishment for every crime?
The death penalty
The death penalty. San Marino followed in 1865, but only one more country had joined them by 1900.
Q 10Which group began in 1961 with an Observer appeal by the lawyer Peter Benenson for people jailed for their beliefs?
Amnesty International
Amnesty International. Benenson said he wrote after reading of two Portuguese students jailed for a toast to liberty, though a historian later failed to trace any such report.
Q 11Who shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with India's Kailash Satyarthi for defending children's right to education?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai. A Taliban gunman shot her on a school bus in 2012 for speaking up for girls' schooling, and two years later, at 17, she became the youngest Nobel laureate.
Q 12Whose 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was laid on an empty chair in Oslo while he served eleven years for 'inciting subversion'?
Liu Xiaobo
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.
Q 13Which lawyer, sacked as a judge in Iran's 1979 revolution, became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Q 21Which wording in the Universal Declaration's first article is India's Hansa Mehta credited with changing to 'all human beings'?
All men
All men. Mehta, who also helped draft India's constitution, is widely credited with the change, made so the article would speak for women as well as men.
Q 22The UN's 2015 minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners are named after which former political prisoner?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela. The rules honour a man who spent 27 years in prison, and they bar solitary confinement lasting longer than 15 days.
Q 23Which French jurist, a co-author of the Universal Declaration, won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize on its 20th anniversary?
René Cassin
Shirin Ebadi
Shirin Ebadi won in 2003, the first Iranian laureate. One of Iran's first women judges, she was made a clerk in the very court she had presided over.
Q 14What do the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wear when marching for children 'disappeared' by Argentina's 1976–83 junta?
White headscarves
White headscarves, first made from their children's nappies, are embroidered with the names of the lost; the marches began outside the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on 30 April 1977.
Q 15Which Russian tax adviser, dead in a Moscow jail in 2009, lends his name to laws sanctioning individual rights abusers?
Sergei Magnitsky
Sergei Magnitsky had accused Russian officials of a huge tax fraud; the first Magnitsky Act passed in Washington in 2012, and a Moscow court then convicted him of tax evasion after his death.
Q 16Where did the UN General Assembly adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its New York home still unbuilt?
Paris
Paris. The Assembly met in the Palais de Chaillot, whose terrace facing the Eiffel Tower is now called the Esplanade of Human Rights.
Q 17The Universal Declaration was adopted on 10 December 1948, now Human Rights Day, after drafting by a commission chaired by which American?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt. The former First Lady told the Assembly the text 'may well become the international Magna Carta', and it passed by 48 votes to none.
Q 18The 30th and final article of the Universal Declaration bars anyone from using the text to do what?
Destroy the rights it lists
Destroy the rights it lists. Article 30 says nothing in the text gives any state, group or person a right to wipe out those freedoms, so no one right can be used to cancel the rest.
Q 19The two 1966 UN covenants split the Universal Declaration's rights into civil and political rights and what else?
Economic, social and cultural
Economic, social and cultural. The UN first planned a single binding covenant, but states disagreed over which kind of right mattered more, so in 1952 it was split in two.
Q 20Which state abstained on the 1948 Universal Declaration over its articles on changing religion and equal marriage?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia objected to Article 18's right 'to change his religion or belief' and to Article 16 on marriage, yet Syria, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan all voted for the text.
René Cassin. Severely wounded as a young soldier in the First World War, he founded a French federation of disabled veterans before turning to the rights of everyone.
Q 24The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was the first to protect which group in wartime?
Civilians
Civilians. The first three conventions dealt with wounded soldiers, sailors and prisoners of war, and it took the Second World War to push states into covering people under occupation.
Q 25The 1998 treaty founding the International Criminal Court is named for which city, where it was adopted on 17 July?
Rome
Rome. Delegates adopted the statute there by 120 votes to 7, and its date, 17 July, is now marked each year as the Day of International Criminal Justice.
Q 26Which offence, ranked 'supreme' by the Nuremberg judges, came under the ICC's jurisdiction only in 2018?
Crime of aggression
Crime of aggression. The court's 1998 statute listed the crime without defining it; a definition followed at Kampala in 2010, and member states switched on the power to try it only from 17 July 2018.
Q 27The International Criminal Court's first-ever conviction, of Congo militia chief Thomas Lubanga in 2012, was for what?
Conscripting child soldiers
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.
Q 28Which sitting president was the first indicted by the International Criminal Court, in 2009, over the war in Darfur?
Omar al-Bashir
Omar al-Bashir stayed in office for another decade, and ICC member Chad declined to arrest him on a 2010 visit, before a military coup ousted him in April 2019.
Q 29Which body, the UN's principal judicial organ, took The Gambia's case against Myanmar over the Rohingya in 2019?
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice settles disputes between states rather than trying individuals, and in January 2020 it ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya.
Q 30Which city hosts the European Court of Human Rights, where individuals can file cases against their own governments?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg. Most of the court's cases are brought by individuals rather than states, and Russia left its reach in 2022 after being expelled from the parent body over the invasion of Ukraine.