100 Fun Facts About Human Rights

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists rest, leisure and which workplace benefit as a right?

Paid holidays. Article 24 asks for 'periodic holidays with pay', and a binding UN covenant of 1966 went further by adding pay for public holidays.

Guinness World Records has certified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the world's most what?

Translated document. The declaration binds no state the way a treaty does, yet it has been put into more than 500 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu.

Which country is the only UN member that has never ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child?

United States. It helped draft the convention and signed it in 1995, yet it became the last UN member outside the treaty once Somalia ratified in 2015.

Which country was the last on Earth to abolish slavery, in 1981, and allowed slaveholders to be prosecuted only in 2007?

Mauritania banned slavery by decree in 1981 but passed no criminal law to enforce it, and tens of thousands of people were still living in bondage decades later.

When Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire in 1833, who received the £20 million compensation?

The owners of enslaved people got the money, not the freed: the £20 million equalled 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual income, and the debt raised to fund it was only certainly extinguished in 2015.

The word 'refugee' entered English in the 1680s for which group fleeing France once the Edict of Nantes was revoked?

Huguenots. About 50,000 of these French Protestants settled in England, where their weavers set up a major industry in and around London's Spitalfields.

Under the Third Geneva Convention, a captured soldier need give only name, rank, date of birth and which other detail?

Serial number completes the list in Article 17, which adds that captives who refuse to say more may not be threatened or ill-treated for it, and no form of coercion may be used to extract more.

Which clay artefact in the British Museum did the last Shah of Iran call 'the world's first charter of human rights'?

Cyrus Cylinder. Historians read it as royal propaganda and call the charter label an anachronism, yet in 1971 the Shah's sister presented a replica to the United Nations in New York.

In the 1860s Venezuela became the first surviving country to abolish which punishment for every crime?

The death penalty. San Marino followed in 1865, but only one more country had joined them by 1900.

Which group began in 1961 with an Observer appeal by the lawyer Peter Benenson for people jailed for their beliefs?

Amnesty International. Benenson said he wrote after reading of two Portuguese students jailed for a toast to liberty, though a historian later failed to trace any such report.

Who shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with India's Kailash Satyarthi for defending children's right to education?

Malala Yousafzai. A Taliban gunman shot her on a school bus in 2012 for speaking up for girls' schooling, and two years later, at 17, she became the youngest Nobel laureate.

Whose 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was laid on an empty chair in Oslo while he served eleven years for 'inciting subversion'?

Liu Xiaobo, jailed over the Charter 08 democracy manifesto, never collected it: actress Liv Ullmann read his essay 'I Have No Enemies' at the ceremony, and he died of liver cancer in July 2017, weeks after being granted medical parole.

Which lawyer, sacked as a judge in Iran's 1979 revolution, became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Shirin Ebadi won in 2003, the first Iranian laureate. One of Iran's first women judges, she was made a clerk in the very court she had presided over.

What do the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wear when marching for children 'disappeared' by Argentina's 1976–83 junta?

White headscarves, first made from their children's nappies, are embroidered with the names of the lost; the marches began outside the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on 30 April 1977.

Which Russian tax adviser, dead in a Moscow jail in 2009, lends his name to laws sanctioning individual rights abusers?

Sergei Magnitsky had accused Russian officials of a huge tax fraud; the first Magnitsky Act passed in Washington in 2012, and a Moscow court then convicted him of tax evasion after his death.

Where did the UN General Assembly adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its New York home still unbuilt?

Paris. The Assembly met in the Palais de Chaillot, whose terrace facing the Eiffel Tower is now called the Esplanade of Human Rights.

The Universal Declaration was adopted on 10 December 1948, now Human Rights Day, after drafting by a commission chaired by which American?

Eleanor Roosevelt. The former First Lady told the Assembly the text 'may well become the international Magna Carta', and it passed by 48 votes to none.

The 30th and final article of the Universal Declaration bars anyone from using the text to do what?

Destroy the rights it lists. Article 30 says nothing in the text gives any state, group or person a right to wipe out those freedoms, so no one right can be used to cancel the rest.

The two 1966 UN covenants split the Universal Declaration's rights into civil and political rights and what else?

Economic, social and cultural. The UN first planned a single binding covenant, but states disagreed over which kind of right mattered more, so in 1952 it was split in two.

Which state abstained on the 1948 Universal Declaration over its articles on changing religion and equal marriage?

Saudi Arabia objected to Article 18's right 'to change his religion or belief' and to Article 16 on marriage, yet Syria, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan all voted for the text.

Which wording in the Universal Declaration's first article is India's Hansa Mehta credited with changing to 'all human beings'?

All men. Mehta, who also helped draft India's constitution, is widely credited with the change, made so the article would speak for women as well as men.

The UN's 2015 minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners are named after which former political prisoner?

Nelson Mandela. The rules honour a man who spent 27 years in prison, and they bar solitary confinement lasting longer than 15 days.

Which French jurist, a co-author of the Universal Declaration, won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize on its 20th anniversary?

René Cassin. Severely wounded as a young soldier in the First World War, he founded a French federation of disabled veterans before turning to the rights of everyone.

The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was the first to protect which group in wartime?

Civilians. The first three conventions dealt with wounded soldiers, sailors and prisoners of war, and it took the Second World War to push states into covering people under occupation.

The 1998 treaty founding the International Criminal Court is named for which city, where it was adopted on 17 July?

Rome. Delegates adopted the statute there by 120 votes to 7, and its date, 17 July, is now marked each year as the Day of International Criminal Justice.

Which offence, ranked 'supreme' by the Nuremberg judges, came under the ICC's jurisdiction only in 2018?

Crime of aggression. The court's 1998 statute listed the crime without defining it; a definition followed at Kampala in 2010, and member states switched on the power to try it only from 17 July 2018.

The International Criminal Court's first-ever conviction, of Congo militia chief Thomas Lubanga in 2012, was for what?

Conscripting child soldiers under fifteen and using them in the Ituri fighting earned Lubanga a 14-year sentence, with his six years in detention since 2006 counted towards it.

Which sitting president was the first indicted by the International Criminal Court, in 2009, over the war in Darfur?

Omar al-Bashir stayed in office for another decade, and ICC member Chad declined to arrest him on a 2010 visit, before a military coup ousted him in April 2019.

Which body, the UN's principal judicial organ, took The Gambia's case against Myanmar over the Rohingya in 2019?

The International Court of Justice settles disputes between states rather than trying individuals, and in January 2020 it ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya.

Which city hosts the European Court of Human Rights, where individuals can file cases against their own governments?

Strasbourg. Most of the court's cases are brought by individuals rather than states, and Russia left its reach in 2022 after being expelled from the parent body over the invasion of Ukraine.

The 1981 Dudgeon case, Europe's first human-rights ruling against criminalising gay sex, challenged the law of which place?

Northern Ireland still criminalised male homosexual acts under an 1885 law when Belfast shipping clerk Jeff Dudgeon complained; the court found a breach of his private life, and the law changed in 1982.

Which UN body first enforced the 1948 Genocide Convention, convicting former mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998?

The Rwanda tribunal, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, also ruled in Akayesu that rape and sexual assault count as acts of genocide when committed with intent to destroy a group.

Who became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes when the Yugoslavia tribunal indicted him in 1999?

Slobodan Milošević conducted his own defence at The Hague after his 2001 extradition and died of a heart attack in his cell in 2006 before the trial could conclude.

Whose 1998 arrest in London on a Spanish warrant led Britain's Law Lords to deny former heads of state immunity?

Augusto Pinochet was held for over a year under judge Baltasar Garzón's universal-jurisdiction warrant before Britain let him fly home to Chile on health grounds in March 2000.

In 1915 the Allies first accused a government of 'crimes against humanity', over Ottoman massacres of which people?

Armenians were being deported and killed across the Ottoman Empire when Britain, France and Russia issued their note on 24 May 1915, and a 1948 UN report cited it as a precedent for the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.

Which kind of group was left out of the 1948 Genocide Convention's definition of protected victims?

Political groups were in the first draft, but states from the Soviet Union to Sweden and Brazil opposed protecting them, so the treaty covers only 'national, ethnical, racial or religious' groups.

Which Polish-Jewish lawyer coined the word 'genocide' in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe?

Raphael Lemkin built the word from genos ('family, clan, tribe, race') and -cide ('killing'), then lobbied the UN until the 1948 convention adopted many of his proposals.

Which principle in the 1951 Refugee Convention bars sending a refugee back to where their life or freedom is threatened?

Non-refoulement, from the French for pushing back, is now seen as customary international law that binds even states that never signed the convention.

Habeas corpus, the writ that brings a detainee before a judge, literally means what in Latin?

'That you have the body' is the order to the jailer. England's Habeas Corpus Act 1679 tightened the procedure after judges' rulings had blunted the writ.

The word 'asylum', literally 'an inviolable place' safe from seizure, ultimately comes from which ancient language?

Greek asylon joined a- ('without') to sylē ('right of seizure'): a sanctuary such as a temple, from which a fugitive could not be taken without sacrilege.

What term did Peter Benenson's 1961 Observer article coin for people jailed for opinions that did not advocate violence?

Prisoner of conscience. The article defined one as anyone 'physically restrained' from voicing an honestly held opinion, and announced a London office to collect such prisoners' names and conditions.

Human Rights Watch began in 1978 as a 'Watch' committee named for which city, where a 1975 East–West accord was signed?

Helsinki Watch backed the citizens' groups checking Soviet-bloc compliance with the 1975 accords; Americas Watch and Asia Watch followed, and in 1988 the committees took one name, Human Rights Watch.

Which Geneva body, its members elected to three-year terms, replaced a discredited UN commission in 2006?

The Human Rights Council replaced a 53-seat commission criticised for seating countries with poor records, and its own members can be suspended, as Russia was in 2022.

Which country in 1893 became the first self-governing nation to give women the vote in national elections?

New Zealand. Kate Sheppard's third petition was signed by about one in four of the country's women, and the premier's manoeuvre to sink the bill in the upper house backfired.

Which 1984 UN treaty says 'no exceptional circumstances whatsoever', not even war, may justify the practice it outlaws?

The Convention against Torture came into force on 26 June 1987, a date now marked as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture; a committee of experts monitors compliance.

Which French playwright issued a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791 and was guillotined two years later?

Olympe de Gouges wrote that a woman 'has the right to mount the scaffold' and so 'must equally have the right to mount the speaker's platform'; the Revolutionary Tribunal granted her only the first.

Who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and died eleven days after giving birth to Frankenstein's author?

Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women only seemed inferior to men because they were denied an education; the daughter she died bearing became the novelist Mary Shelley.

Which country's 1996 constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation?

South Africa's section 9(3) bars discrimination on race, gender, sexual orientation and other grounds; in 2006 it became the fifth country in the world, and still the only one in Africa, to legalise same-sex marriage.

Which body, often confused with the European Union, runs the European Court of Human Rights?

Council of Europe. Churchill called for such a body in a 1946 speech in Zurich, and ten states founded it in London in 1949, before any forerunner of the EU existed.

Which country hosts the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, set up in 1979 and known for a landmark 1988 ruling against Honduras?

Costa Rica's capital gave the court's founding treaty its nickname, the Pact of San José; in 1988 the judges held Honduras liable for failing to investigate a forced disappearance.

Which European country gave women the vote in national elections only after a 1971 referendum?

Switzerland held out until 1971, and one canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, kept women out of its own votes until a federal court forced the change in 1990.

Whose 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, set off a 381-day boycott?

Rosa Parks was not the first: 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same refusal earlier that year, but local leaders were looking for a stronger test case.

Which rights organisation did the deafblind author Helen Keller help to found in 1920?

The ACLU counts Helen Keller among its founders: beyond her fame for overcoming deafblindness, she was a socialist who campaigned for women's suffrage and labour rights.

Which Olympics host of 1968 saw Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise gloved fists on the podium?

Mexico City's podium protest got both sprinters suspended from their team, and all three medallists, including Australia's Peter Norman, wore Olympic Project for Human Rights badges.

Which Greenwich Village bar did police raid in June 1969, sparking riots that Pride marches honour?

The Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia, and the marches held on the first anniversary of the riots grew into the Pride parades held each June.

Which English monarch sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 under pressure from rebel barons?

King John did not keep his word: within months Pope Innocent III had annulled the charter, and England slid into the First Barons' War.

Which escaped slave made about 13 trips back south as a conductor on the Underground Railroad?

Harriet Tubman said she never lost a passenger, and she later guided a raid at Combahee Ferry that freed more than 700 enslaved people.

Which codebreaker convicted of gross indecency in 1952 lends his name to a law pardoning gay men?

Alan Turing accepted hormone treatment as a condition of probation and received a royal pardon only in 2013; the 2017 law extended pardons to some 49,000 other men.

Which Anglican archbishop chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed as apartheid ended?

Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, was chosen to lead hearings into abuses committed by both sides of the apartheid struggle.

Which country became the first to legalise same-sex marriage, with its first weddings in April 2001?

The Netherlands led the way: on the day the law took effect, Amsterdam's mayor Job Cohen became a registrar specially so that he could marry the first four couples himself.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a Union general enforced the end of slavery in which state?

Texas was the most remote state of the Confederacy, so General Gordon Granger's order at Galveston came more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Which lawyer won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and later sat on the Supreme Court?

Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, and in 1967 became its first African-American member.

Which president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 once a long Senate filibuster had been broken?

Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the bill that John F. Kennedy had proposed in June 1963; it outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex and national origin.

Who founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 and led Britain's militant suffragettes?

Emmeline Pankhurst wanted action rather than talk: she was jailed again and again and went on hunger strike, while many of her followers were force-fed in prison.

Which Caribbean nation, independent since 1804, is the only country ever founded by a slave revolt?

Haiti's revolution against French rule also made it the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery and only the second republic in the hemisphere.

Which Burmese opposition leader won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize while held under house arrest?

Aung San Suu Kyi could not collect it: her sons accepted the prize on her behalf, and she gave her Nobel lecture only in 2012, two decades late.

Which physicist called for the International Rescue Committee, founded to aid those fleeing Hitler?

Albert Einstein asked for a New York branch of a European relief body in the early 1930s; it took its lasting name after a merger in 1942.

On which island nation does the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, opened in January 2002, sit?

Cuba's south-east coast holds the naval base where at least 780 people from 48 countries have been detained since the first arrivals at Camp X-Ray.

Which city is home to both the International Criminal Court and Andrew Carnegie's Peace Palace?

The Hague also housed the UN court for the former Yugoslavia, which indicted 161 people before it closed in 2017.

From which language does 'apartheid', the name of the racial segregation system begun in 1948, come?

Afrikaans gave the world 'apartheid', literally 'apart-ness'; the system it named lasted until the non-racial elections of April 1994.

Which Yorkshire MP headed the 20-year parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade?

William Wilberforce saw the trade outlawed in 1807 and died in 1833, three days after hearing that the bill to end slavery itself was sure to pass.

Which suffragist was arrested in Rochester, New York, for voting in the 1872 presidential election?

Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 and refused to pay a cent of it; the authorities chose not to press the matter any further.

Which American envoy helped Lafayette draft France's Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789?

Thomas Jefferson, then his country's diplomat in France, advised his close friend on drafts that echoed the declaration he had written himself in 1776.

Which Auschwitz survivor and author of the memoir Night won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize?

Elie Wiesel, hailed by the Nobel Committee as a 'messenger to mankind', wrote 57 books, most of them in French and English.

Which Nazi official, seized in Argentina by Mossad agents in 1960, stood trial in Jerusalem?

Adolf Eichmann had reached Buenos Aires in 1950 on false papers in the name Ricardo Klement; convicted in Jerusalem, he was hanged in 1962.

Which country was the last in the Americas to abolish slavery, under the 'Golden Law' of 1888?

Brazil's law was signed by Princess Isabel, an opponent of slavery, who was acting as regent while her father Emperor Pedro II was away in Europe.

Which ex-president won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize after founding a centre to promote human rights?

Jimmy Carter, a naval submarine officer who went home to run the family peanut farm, set up his centre after his single term in office ended.

At which city's Games did the Refugee Olympic Team make its debut, competing under the Olympic flag?

Rio de Janeiro welcomed ten refugee athletes in 2016, among them Yusra Mardini, a Syrian teenager who had swum beside a failing boat on her way to Europe.

Which acronym for the Soviet labour camp system did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 book make famous?

Gulag abbreviates the Russian for Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps; the book sold tens of millions of copies and cost its author his Soviet citizenship in 1974.

Which state lost the 1966 Supreme Court case behind the warning police read to suspects in custody?

Arizona's case began in Phoenix, where Ernesto Miranda signed a confession after two hours of questioning without being told he could stay silent.

Which businessman founded the Red Cross after seeing the aftermath of the 1859 Battle of Solferino?

Henry Dunant won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, by which time a business scandal had bankrupted him and left him in poverty and obscurity for decades.

Which English philosopher's Two Treatises of Government defended a right to revolt against tyrants?

John Locke published the Two Treatises anonymously, and their wording is believed to have shaped the Declaration of Independence adopted in July 1776.

Which pamphleteer wrote Rights of Man in 1791 to defend the French Revolution against Edmund Burke?

Thomas Paine was tried in his absence in England in 1792 and convicted of seditious libel for writing it.

Which shipyard electrician led Poland's Solidarity union and won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize?

Lech Wałęsa sent his wife to collect the prize, worried that the authorities would not let him back into the country; seven years later he was its president.

Which playwright co-founded Charter 77 and became Czechoslovakia's last president in 1989?

Václav Havel attended the trial of a psychedelic rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose jailing partly prompted the Charter 77 manifesto.

Which dissident Soviet physicist gives his name to the European Parliament's human rights prize?

Andrei Sakharov oversaw the development of Soviet thermonuclear weapons before turning to activism, which earned him the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.

Which Swedish envoy gave Budapest's Jews protective passports, then vanished in Soviet custody?

Raoul Wallenberg also sheltered people in buildings he declared Swedish territory; Soviet agents detained him in January 1945 on suspicion of spying.

Which novelist's 1898 open letter to France's president denounced the jailing of Alfred Dreyfus?

Émile Zola was found guilty of libel within weeks and fled to England to avoid prison, returning home in June 1899.

Which tax did Mahatma Gandhi defy in 1930 by leading a 24-day march to the sea at Dandi?

The salt tax backed a British monopoly, so when Gandhi made his own by evaporation on the shore, millions followed him in breaking the law.

Which independent office, created in Sweden in 1809, handles citizens' complaints against officials?

Ombudsman comes from an Old Norse word for a representative; King Charles XII had set up a forerunner of the office back in 1713.

Which Latin term names international rules, such as the ban on piracy, that no treaty can override?

Jus cogens norms, also called peremptory norms, allow no derogation: any treaty that conflicts with one is void, even for a state that objects.

Which right of 'all peoples' is set out in the shared first article of the UN's two 1966 covenants?

Self-determination lets peoples freely determine their political status, and the UN Charter's opening chapter names it as a basis for friendly relations among nations.

Which Latin doctrine did Australia's High Court reject in 1992 in the Mabo case on native title?

Terra nullius means 'nobody's land'; Eddie Mabo, the Torres Strait Islander who brought the case, died in January 1992, months before the judges ruled in June.

Which capital hosted the UN's 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, 25 years after Tehran's?

Vienna drew some 7,000 participants and 800 NGOs, and the declaration agreed there was adopted by consensus of 171 states.

Which polar explorer gave his name to the League of Nations passport issued to stateless refugees?

Fridtjof Nansen was the League's High Commissioner for Refugees, and about 450,000 of the passports went to people who could get papers from no national authority.

Which Dalit jurist chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, in force since 1950?

B. R. Ambedkar was born into a caste treated as untouchable; he once publicly burned an ancient text that justified caste discrimination, and in 1956 converted to Buddhism.

Which K'iche' Maya activist from Guatemala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992?

Rigoberta Menchú, born to a poor family in rural El Quiché, was later named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and received the Prince of Asturias Award.

Which suffragette died after walking in front of King George V's horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby?

Emily Davison gave no explanation beforehand; one theory is that she meant to pin a suffragette flag to the horse, Anmer, as it galloped past.

Which country's street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in 2010, sparking the Arab Spring?

Tunisia's president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali stepped down within a month of the protest, after 23 years in power.

Which country's 1949 Basic Law opens with an article declaring human dignity inviolable?

Germany shields that first article with an 'eternity clause', which forbids any amendment that would remove its principles.