'The despotic power of husbands.'.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the enshrinement of its essential rights in international law is one of the great achievement of our civilization. In a large part, we owe their formulation to the great jurist Hersch Lauterpacht, Professor of international law in the University of Cambridge from 1937 to 1954. In 1945, he published a seminal book, An International Bill of the Rights of Man, which became the basis of much that is in the United Nations Declaration and the Conventions that followed it.

According to him: "The idea of the inherent rights of man, ultimately superior to the State itself, is the continuous thread in the historical pattern of legal and political thought. In antiquity, their substance has been a denial of the absoluteness of the State and its unconditional claim to obedience; the assertion of the value and freedom of the individual as against the State; the view that the power of the State and of its ruler is derived ultimately from the assent of those who compose the political community; the insistence that there are limits to the power of the State to interfere with man; the right to do what he considers his duty."

Certain Governments justify their infringements of human rights by describing such notions as expressions of Western European culture, foreign and inapplicable to their own countries, but the subjects of these Governments do not share that view, because, as Lauterpacht pointed out, the rights are inherent to men and women everywhere, regardless of tradition or creed.

Article 1 of the United Nations Declaration states that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", but in only a small part of the world does this apply to women. In 1868, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill anticipated the Declaration when he wrote in an essay "On the Subjection of Women": "A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs. This obligation is almost entirely disregarded in the case of the family relations, a case, in its direct influence on human happiness, more important than all others taken together. The almost despotic power of husbands over wives needs not be enlarged upon here, because nothing more is needed for the complete removal of the evil, than that wives should have the same rights, and should receive the protection of law in the same manner, as all other persons; and because, on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail themselves of the plea of liberty, but stand forth openly as the champions of power."

Yet women are still subject to "the despotic power of husbands" and deprived of any rights in most of the world today.

The most glaring violations of the Declaration concern Article 5, which states that "no one shall be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment". Yet torture is still practised in 39 countries, covering most of the world's population, including 13 countries which signed the Convention Against Torture of 1984. Far too few speak out against that barbaric practice which is a blot on our civilization.

What is needed in the next century above all is the will to put the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into practice, not in just a few countries, but throughout the world, to make it truly universal.