Human Rights Violations and Protections

The prevention of human rights violations is one of the most important yet most challenging policy aims of many states today, especially in the developing world. The United Nations’ adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was succeeded by various forms of international treaties, protocols, and regional institutions that seek to prevent human rights abuses and to promote human rights norms in many areas of the world where they are needed the most. Yet during the Cold War, a large number of human rights violations were committed either by armed nonstate actors or by states. This included numerous extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture of unarmed civilians by authoritarian governments supported by either the United States or the Soviet Union. In ...