Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
The UN Declaration of Human Rights: What Does it Say to Us Today?
Summary
Starting with a historical perspective and then delving into the content of the declaration, this lecture discusses the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its contemporary relevance. The lecture also highlights the 2018 Ipsos Poll on human rights in 28 countries around the world and how each country ranks.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I don’t know all the countries, but I can tell you the following, Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen are amongst them.
There were only three countries that have not signed it. It’s actually the most widely signed declaration of any international treaty. And you know who the three countries are? Somalia, South Sudan, and the United States of America. United States of America has not signed on to that convention.
That really hangs on precisely the point we’re making is that there is this gulf between the vision and the implementation. The UN has not done sufficiently well in this particular regard. The Brown Committee recommended that when it came to human rights abuses, the countries who have a veto on the security council should not have that veto, which might help to some extent.