Day 250: Rights

My Dad pointed out in his blog (Universel) that today is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  His blog was about the concept of universality (which I'll be happy to come back to).  For my part I had a look at the content of the document.  There are 30 articles which would seem reasonable (although that is three times as much as God's rules). But when you look at them more closely you find a mixture of quite fundamental rights mixed in with what I would call aspirations rather than rights.  Of the 30 articles a good third are not fundamental rights as they are very much open to differing interpretations.  Of the remaining 20 at least 10 are repetitions of other ones. Which brings us back to the original 10.  If I was asked to vote for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights I would vote against the present version.  A truly Universal declaration would need to strip out all these specific cultural aspirations (Right to work, Right to Education, Right to Marriage, etc) and stick to simple undeniable human rights (life, movement, opinion).