 In order to understand and be able to use your human rights, it's a good idea to know how they work in kind of a legal way. So it's important to understand that human rights happen on a couple different levels. You have a national level, a regional level, and an international level. We're going to be talking a lot about the international level today because this is where a lot of the kind of interesting big documents have been created and sort of the big history if you want to call it that. But it's really important before we move on to that to understand that at the national level you have different documents and organizations that look out and protect your human rights as a citizen of that country. That's why it's always very important today in the modern world to have a citizenship so that you get those rights. And you also have this very same thing at the regional level. So you might have some sort of court or maybe a commission that is protecting your rights at that level. And at the national level it's often something like a constitution and then your Supreme Court or whatever organization you have at that level. And below all of this I think it's also really important to remember that there are organizations and companies and municipalities, so your city and town and your province that might also have local rights. So these are things like small ordinances or policies that protect certain rights. Like I can think of a town that I used to live in had an equal housing opportunity rule that was a little bit stronger than the national rule and a little bit stronger than the state rule of the state that that city was in. So it's important to remember that these happen at lots of different levels and there are many different ways to get to those rights that we're talking about. So let's go take a look at this international stuff here. And when we talk about human rights in an international or from an international perspective, we can't do it without talking about the United Nations. And that's probably if you're a person who talks about global stuff, you've probably heard about the United Nations, but you might not know exactly what they do. Well, the United Nations was founded in 1945. So this is following World War II. The world has really been rocked by the terrible things that have happened. And coming out of this, everyone is saying, OK, how do we establish peace in the world? So how do we make this world a better place for everyone? And part of that also is thinking about development. So how do we help countries take care of the people that are members or citizens of their countries? And how do we take care of the different people who live in the member states? So you have to remember that the United States or the United Nations is like a big group of countries that have all decided that they're going to work together on this stuff. And then below this, you have rights. It also belongs to this perspective of promoting peace, promoting development, strengthening the rights of people living within the United Nations countries, which is at this point pretty much every country in the world. And a whole very sort of overarching, important idea behind this was the concept of harmonization. So harmonization is a very long word that just means sort of working together in a way. It means we're going to sort of think about how can we all in similar ways and together work on peace, development, and rights? Well, one way that they've done this is through documents. Very important, big documents that now apply to me and to you and to everyone on the planet. And the first really big important one came out in 1948. So let's go talk about these important big United Nations documents. So these documents can often be sort of bunched together and called the International Bill of Human Rights. Now to call it a bill is actually kind of funny because there's actually three documents. So it's not like a bill of human rights in the way that maybe before in the timeline we were talking about the English Bill of Rights. It's not one document, it's actually many documents. And they fall into two important categories. So we need to think about there being these things called declarations. And on the other side we have conventions. Conventions. All right. A convention is also sometimes called a treaty or you might hear it called being called a covenant. We're going to talk first about declarations because these are this document that I mentioned in 1948 is a declaration. And a declaration is what's called non-binding, which means you can sign up for it. You can say we are going to do this thing that's been written into this declaration. But it doesn't mean that it means because it's non-binding it means you don't have to necessarily do it. It's basically like a really big suggestion that has a lot of force behind it because when you sign onto a declaration you're saying our country agrees to this and we think that it's important. And we are going to join the global community in participating in the sort of acting out of this declaration. And the declaration that was passed in 1948 is called the universal declaration. So there's the word declaration of human rights. This is a huge document. This is a really important moment because the world has come out of World War II. They've established this United Nations thing and they're trying to figure out how do we make these rights possible? How do we codify all the things that we have learned? How do we put it all together in one document? And they do this in 30 articles. Each article is essentially a right that you have that I have that every person on the planet has. And a whole part of the universal declaration of human rights is even talking about what is a human? Who gets these things? It's a very important part of the entire discussion that happened around this. And each of these 30 articles is now basically understood to be a right that everyone on the planet should have. Really, it is understood as a right that every person on the planet should have. So this is a very important document. We're going to post it on the course, on the page for this course. And you should definitely take a look at it. Actually, it's probably going to be a required element, so you might have to. But it's a very good read and it's a very interesting one because there are all rights that you have that you should understand so that if they're ever violated you can do something about it and you can point out, point to it as being something that should not have happened. Now over here on the other side we have conventions. Conventions, treaties and covenants are binding. This means you have to do them. This means that you are signing a treaty that obligates you. So this is that word obligations that we talk about in human rights a lot. It obligates you to do this. And it's a very big step to sign a convention. It's a pretty big deal. Now in 1966, there were several of these signed. There were actually two important ones though. The most important ones for human rights is the International Covenant. I'm spelling things wrong. Covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights. We'll talk about what this all means in a second after I've introduced the second and also a very important one, which is the international. So I'm going to abbreviate international again. Covenant. Let's see if I can spell it correctly this time. Covenant on civil and political rights. Now if you were paying attention during the history lesson, you might see an interesting division here. We've got these social and cultural rights that we talked about on the end of the timeline, sort of in the modern era. And then we have these civil and political rights that we talked about. There were just one step before that. And although there's some definitely a lot of, you know, there's a lot of mix and sort of, there's a very big gray zone between these two. These are sort of, it's an interesting thing that these two covenants are sort of a way of taking all of these rights that we've talked about throughout history and putting them onto paper. Now, this is also going back to another lesson. You'll notice that these social and cultural rights, these economic, social and cultural rights, they have to do with things like labor, the health and education, things like that. Which, if you'll remember from our first lesson, are mostly positive rights. So it means that states have to do something about them. States, when they say, okay, we're going to sign this covenant, means that states are then obligated to provide a certain form of education or at least the rules that create that health, labor laws have to be respected. Things like that have to be established and followed. So it's a very important thing to sign that. On the other side, you also have this here, the second one being negative rights. So that means that the state has to give up a certain amount of maybe authority that it thinks it might have over its people or maybe different members of a society think that they might have over people. And they have to say, okay, people have the right to things like their lives, like the freedom of speech or maybe their freedom of religion and assembly. This means that we, as people who are signing onto this convention, as a state that is signing onto this convention, are going to leave people alone in terms of these rights. So when people are practicing their civil and political rights, we're going to let them do that. So it's a pretty big step you have to imagine. This is 1966, the world is a pretty interesting place at that time. And these are rights that are being established in that moment. So it's very important to understand all three of these. We're going to post all of them to the course on alversity.org so that you can read them and see them and maybe even print them out and save them somewhere because they're very fundamental. You as a human being living on this planet, watching this video, have these rights and it's important that you understand what they are. And it's also important that you understand that you can do something about them. And we'll be talking a little bit more about that in a later lesson.