The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which turns three-quarters of a century this Sunday, has inspired the Constitutions of numerous states. Eleanor Roosevelt was in charge of presenting the text to the UN General Assembly in 1948.

The world thus took a key step after the barbarism and horror lived in the Second World War. “We were leaving for a new world that had to be in peace, a world with rights, a world in which everyone should be equal,” Karlos Castilla Juárez, professor of International Law at the Pompeu Fabra University, explains in laSexta.

Despite not being a binding document, numerous nations incorporated the text into their constitutions. Lawyer Patricia Fernández Vicens recalls that “it was necessary to put a stop to the possibility of other genocides in other parts of the world. That consensus is essential and it is the one that we have today obligation to preserve“.

The Declaration marked the destiny to which humanity had to go. But the violation of human rights has occurred all over the world during these years. Between the years 2000 and 2022, one and a half million people have been victims of wars. Fernández Vicens regrets that “human rights are also violated on our borders: they are violated in the richest societies of the global north when there is no equitable distribution of wealth“.

In this sense, Castilla Juárez warns that, “unfortunately, economic interests and geopolitics outweigh human dignity or human well-being in general.” This is why today it continues to be as necessary as in 1948. vindication and protection of the Declaration.