Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 in Paris, drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt with René Cassin, Charles Malik, P. C. Chang and others contributing across differing legal and philosophical traditions. Its thirty articles set out civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights intended to apply to all people regardless of nation, and it is the founding text of the modern international human rights system, later given binding treaty form through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both opened for signature in 1966. The Declaration itself is a General Assembly resolution, not a treaty, and its text was never presented for state ratification; it creates no binding legal obligation by its own force, though many scholars argue parts of it have since become binding through customary international law or through incorporation into national constitutions and binding treaties. Its inclusion here as a code-class instrument reflects its role as a foundational codification of asserted universal legal norms, not a claim that it binds states as law in the way a ratified treaty or an enacted statute does.