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50 free Human Rights trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Human rights law is younger than most people think. The Universal Declaration was voted through in 1948 by delegates who had just lived through a world war, and the binding treaties, international courts and watchdog groups that give it teeth mostly arrived decades later — some within living memory. These 50 questions follow that story: the drafting of the declaration and the covenants that made it law, the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war, the courts and tribunals from The Hague to the regional systems, the cases that set precedents, the campaigners who won Nobel prizes or died in custody, and the vocabulary — refugee, asylum, genocide, habeas corpus — that the whole field is built on. Play it as a ten-question round, use it for a civics or law class, or print it for a quiz night. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the headline left out.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists rest, leisure and which workplace benefit as a right?
Paid holidays
Paid holidays are a human right under Article 24, which demands 'reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay'. Article 26 of the same text makes elementary education compulsory and free.
Q 02Roughly how many languages carry the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from Abkhaz to Zulu?
More than 500
More than 500 languages carry it — 577 at the UN's last count — making the declaration the most translated document in the world.
Q 03Which country is the only UN member that has never ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child?
United States
The United States signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 but never ratified it, leaving it alone among UN members; the treaty defines a child as anyone under eighteen.
Q 04Which country was the last on Earth to abolish slavery, in 1981, and allowed slaveholders to be prosecuted only in 2007?
Mauritania
Mauritania abolished slavery by decree in 1981, yet the 2018 Global Slavery Index still estimated 90,000 people enslaved there, about two per cent of the population.
Q 05When Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire in 1833, who received the £20 million compensation?
The owners
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.
Q 06The word 'refugee' entered English in the 1680s for which group fleeing France once the Edict of Nantes was revoked?
Huguenots
Huguenots — French Protestants stripped of legal protection in 1685 — were the first people called 'refugees' in English, the word coming from French réfugié, one who flees to a place of safety.
Q 07Under the Third Geneva Convention, a captured soldier need give only name, rank, date of birth and which other detail?
Serial number
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.
Q 08Which clay artefact in the British Museum did the last Shah of Iran call 'the world's first charter of human rights'?
Cyrus Cylinder
The Cyrus Cylinder, dug up in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, dates from the 6th century BC, and a replica sits in a second-floor hallway of UN headquarters in New York.
Q 09Which country abolished the death penalty for all crimes in its 1864 constitution, the first surviving state to do so?
Venezuela
Venezuela beat San Marino to it by a year, and by 1900 only three countries in the world had abolished capital punishment for every crime.
Q 10Which group began in 1961 with an Observer article about two Portuguese students jailed for a toast to liberty?
Amnesty International
Amnesty International grew from barrister Peter Benenson's article 'The Forgotten Prisoners'; the students had been given seven years, and the movement it started won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 11Who shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with India's Kailash Satyarthi, two years after a Taliban gunman shot her?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai was 17 when she collected the prize, making her the youngest Nobel laureate ever; the shooting had happened on 9 October 2012 as she rode home from an exam in Pakistan's Swat Valley.
Q 12Whose 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was laid on an empty chair in Oslo while he served eleven years for 'inciting subversion'?
Liu Xiaobo
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.
Q 13Which lawyer, sacked as a judge in Iran's 1979 revolution, became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Q 21Which Indian delegate replaced 'all men' with 'all human beings' in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration?
Hansa Mehta
Hansa Mehta is widely credited with the change, made to better reflect gender equality; Article 1 now opens 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights'.
Q 22Which Canadian professor, the UN's first human rights division director, wrote the Universal Declaration's first draft?
John Humphrey
John Humphrey, a McGill law professor who had lost his left arm in a childhood fire, prepared the preliminary draft after consulting the Commission's executive group chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Q 23Which French jurist, a co-author of the Universal Declaration, won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize on its 20th anniversary?
Shirin Ebadi
Shirin Ebadi won in 2003, the first Iranian to receive the prize; she had been the first female president of the Tehran city court before being demoted to a clerk in the court she once ran.
Q 14What do the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wear when marching for children 'disappeared' by Argentina's 1976–83 junta?
White headscarves
White headscarves symbolise the nappies of their lost children and are embroidered with their names and dates of birth; the marches began outside the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on 30 April 1977.
Q 15Which Russian tax adviser, dead in a Moscow jail in 2009, lends his name to laws sanctioning individual rights abusers?
Sergei Magnitsky
Sergei Magnitsky had exposed a tax fraud by Russian officials; the first Magnitsky Act passed in Washington in 2012, and a Moscow court then convicted him of tax evasion posthumously in 2013.
Q 16Where did the UN General Assembly adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its New York home still unbuilt?
Paris
Paris hosted the Assembly's third session at the Palais de Chaillot; the UN's Manhattan headquarters was not declared complete until October 1952.
Q 17Human Rights Day marks the anniversary of the 1948 vote adopting the Universal Declaration — on which date?
10 December
10 December is Human Rights Day because the General Assembly adopted the declaration that day in 1948, by 48 votes to none with eight abstentions.
Q 18How many articles make up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the last forbidding its use to destroy the rest?
30
30 articles run from Article 1's 'born free and equal in dignity and rights' to Article 30, which says nothing in the text gives any state, group or person a right to destroy the freedoms it lists.
Q 19The two 1966 UN covenants split the Universal Declaration's rights into civil and political rights and what else?
Economic, social and cultural
Economic, social and cultural rights fill one covenant and civil and political rights the other; with the declaration they form the 'International Bill of Human Rights', which came into force in 1976.
Q 20Which state abstained on the 1948 Universal Declaration over its articles on changing religion and equal marriage?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia balked at Article 18's right 'to change his religion or belief' and Article 16 on marriage; the six communist abstainers complained instead that the text did not condemn fascism strongly enough.
René Cassin
René Cassin also presided over the European Court of Human Rights from 1965 to 1968, and in 1987 his remains were moved to the crypt of the Panthéon.
Q 24The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was the first to protect which group, the first three covering only combatants?
Civilians
Civilians in enemy hands or under occupation gained treaty protection only after the Second World War exposed the gap; all four 1949 conventions have since been ratified by 196 countries, more than belong to the UN.
Q 25The 1998 treaty founding the International Criminal Court is named for which city, where it was adopted on 17 July?
Rome
The Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002; more than 120 states are party to it, while China and India have neither signed nor acceded.
Q 26Which offence, ranked 'supreme' by the Nuremberg judges, came under the ICC's jurisdiction only in 2018?
Crime of aggression
Crime of aggression — starting an illegal war — was defined only at the 2010 Kampala review conference, and two-thirds of states parties voted to activate the court's jurisdiction on 17 July 2018.
Q 27The International Criminal Court's first-ever conviction, of Congo militia chief Thomas Lubanga in 2012, was for what?
Conscripting child soldiers
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.
Q 28Which sitting president was the first indicted by the International Criminal Court, in 2009, over the war in Darfur?
Omar al-Bashir
Omar al-Bashir's warrant listed five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes, with three counts of genocide added in 2010; a military coup finally ousted him in April 2019.
Q 29Which body, the UN's principal judicial organ, took The Gambia's case against Myanmar over the Rohingya in 2019?
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice sits in The Hague's Peace Palace, built with $1.5 million from Andrew Carnegie, and in January 2020 it ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya.
Q 30Which French city hosts the European Court of Human Rights, where any individual in 46 countries can file a case?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg's court takes applications 'by any person, non-governmental organisation, or group of individuals' against its member states; Russia was expelled from the system in March 2022 after invading Ukraine.