Today, October 16, is Blog Action Day, where thousands of different bloggers from all over the world post about the same theme. This year’s theme is HUMAN RIGHTS.

After surfing the net trying to get an idea of what I could contribute, I kept coming across articles about how governments seem to be ignoring people’s human rights more and more these days. The thing was, I didn’t even know what these magical “human rights” were. Where did these rights come from? Who decided what they were? Are they international law? That’s when I came across the Universal Declaration and decided to turn them into an accessible poster because I knew that a lot of people had probably never read them either.

After the horror of World War II, the United Nations was formed in 1945. The UN charter’s main two objectives are ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ and ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.’ In 1946, the UN Commission on Human Rights was established. Chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the commission drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948 ‘as a common standard of achievement for all people and nations’. Today, it is the job of the Human Rights Council, an important body of the United Nations, to promote and protect people’s human rights around the world.

This poster uses a simplified version of the Declaration. You can read the original wording here. For more information about the history of the Declaration I suggest this article. For more info about Blog Action Day and to find contributions from other bloggers, visit the official website.

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A few readers have since shown me this cool typographic video of the Declaration.