Eleanor Roosevelt holding poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in English), Lake Success, New York. November 1949.
War, Political Conflict, and the Right to Health
by Leonard Rubenstein // December 11, 2019
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes no reference to war except to assert that respect for human rights is a means of preventing it. The lack of attention is not surprising given that in the post-World War II period the conduct of war was the subject of the 1945 Nuremberg Declaration about war crimes and crimes against humanity, and intense debate in the lead-up to the re-drafting of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Indeed, part of the push for addressing human rights in the UN Charter was the belief that respect for human dignity in peacetime was being neglected.[1] The consequence of that peacetime focus, though, led to almost 60 years of neglect of the right to health in armed conflict