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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - 1948

 

            The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created in 1948 as an answer to the catastrophe of the world wars and the Holocaust. After Germany's defeat in WWI, Hitler's government envisioned a vast, new empire of 'living space' (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe. Firstly, the Jews of Germany were subjected to a series of discriminatory laws, including the Nuremberg Laws introduced in 1935, in which the Nazi revoke Reich citizenship for Jews and prohibit Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of German. The article 15 of the UDHR states that everyone has the right to a nationality. link it to one of the articles that talks about the right to have a national identity. Secondly in 1938 when the Kristallnacht event occurred, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed. Additionally, in 1942 the Nazi plan to completely destroy the Jews of Europe, known as 'The Final Solution', was fully implemented. "Final Solution" was the Nazi code name for the genocide of all 11 million European Jews, as well as Romani, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexuals and disabled non-Jewish Germans. After being transported to hundreds of concentration camps, slave labour camps or one of the six death camps, they were sorted into groups that were to be used for labour, medical experimentation or immediately murdered. The results of those prisoners who were coerced into participating in traumatic medical experiments typically are death, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such are considered as examples of medical torture. At the Doctors' trial in 1947 after the Holocaust, several of the doctors argued in their defense that there was no international law regarding medical experimentation. To prevent something like this – the horrendous experiences of the holocaust – from ever happening again, the International Community, through the United Nations, composed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a "fight to deliver human rights".


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