The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

The Impact on Human Rights and Responsibilities

Senior Division Website
by Henry Su, Elliot Choy, and Max Toubin

Process Paper For this years National History Day Project Theme on Rights and Responsibilities, we have decided to base our project around the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are creating a documentary to reveal the impact of this document on the history of human rights and responsibilities. We chose this topic because this document has inspired us to find out the true reality of the rights being taken and the responsibilities that no one has bothered to shoulder. Our topic is important because it shows the difference between reality and assumption when it comes to this topic. To conduct research for our project, the obvious source would be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written by the United Nations in 1948 after the end of World War II. This source gave us the rights of everybody around the world. Furthermore, this source was able to provide us something to center our project around. Another source we were able to find that revolved around the document was a video about The Story of Human Rights uploaded by Human Rights Video Education. This gave an overall summary on what led up to the creation of this document and its impacts before and after it was written. Another source we were able to locate was an interview with a professor at a university. (continue once interview is done). Other valuable sources to our project included the many speeches written by famous Civil Rights Leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi. These sources gave us insight on events in history that occurred directly with the violation of human rights and responsibilities. All these sources helped aid the creation of this project. We encountered some problems with our project research because with human rights being such a broad topic, it was difficult to find specific examples in which human rights were violated. There were many broad examples, but the details in which those actions violated the Declaration directly were hard to find because many of those are implied. Furthermore, it was difficult to find sources on the responsibility issue because many of those responsibilities were also implied by human nature. Therefore, it was much easier to find secondary sources and facts about those rights and responsibilities compare to the primary sources and interviews. Our topic of human rights fit into this years theme on rights and responsibilities because we focus on how there are basic human rights that everyone deserves as well as human responsibilities to respect the rights for everybody. This project is important because it shows although all humans are guaranteed basic human rights, many are deprived of them due to the lack of responsibility that others demonstrate that depriving them of those rights. There have been many more documents and contracts that support the need for those rights and responsibilities, such as the Magna Carta, but the effect of them will be minimal if each individual does not step up and do his or her part in history.