Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Adopted in 1948 by the U.N. General Assembly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines the fundamental rights inherent to all people. In its thirty articles, the document expresses many basic human rights including the rights to life, liberty and security of person, the right to marry and to form a family, the right to own property, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the right to peaceful assembly, the right to work in favorable conditions, the right to rest and leisure, the right to a standard of living, and the right to education. In addition all people have the freedoms from torture or from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and from arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in over five hundred languages from the United Nations Office of High Commissioner.
Locating Treaty Reports & Other Documents
An important part of human rights research is the identification of documents required to be produced by treaty parties. State parties must report progress through observations and commentaries. These observations and commentaries may be found using one of the following resources.
Bayefsky.com / The United Nations Human Rights Treaties This site leads you to the text and amendments of human rights treaties and relevant supporting documents. The researcher will find ratifications, reservations, declarations, objections and derogations, reporting history, state reports, lists of issues, summary records, and concluding observations. The database allows browsing by state, category, or subject matter.
U.N. Treaty Body Database The U.N. Treaty Body database supplies the same supporting treaty documents as Bayefsky but allows for filtering by region/county, committee, document type, symbol, or date. Treaty documents are given in English, French, and Spanish.
United Nations Document System The Official Document System (ODS) is available in multiple languages and includes digitized United Nations documentation since 1993. Additional scanned documentation is being added back to 1946 Multiple search options are available.
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International Human Rights Treaties
The following table outlines the nine core international human rights treaties and their monitoring bodies. Supplemental optional protocol are listed at the United Nations Human Rights website.
Regional Human Rights Systems
In additional to international human rights treaties, there are regional human rights systems as well.
Africa: African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights
Americas: American Convention on Human Rights
Europe: Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
Library Search/Retrieval Options
UW Libraries QuickSearch: includes the collections of the University Libraries, UW Law Library, and the American Heritage Center.
Prospector: a unified catalog of twenty-three academic, public and special libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. UW students, faculty and staff can borrow materials from Prospector.
Interlibrary Loan: UW students, faculty and staff can request books, journal volumes, journal articles and other materials, regardless of whether it is available in the UW Libraries, online or in libraries around the world. A free service!