ABSTRACT
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in San Francisco in 1948, has been described as representing the highest aspirations of the common man, a document designed to replace oppression and the scourge of war. Each of the Declaration’s thirty clauses describes freedoms and needs which, if met, would lead to a just and potentially fulfilling quality of life for all. These freedoms, in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s terms, were of two kinds: freedom from and freedom to (Berlin, 1969). Freedom from refers to an absence of constraints such as hunger, poverty, discrimination, homelessness, and sickness. Freedom to refers to the presence of opportunities for education, health care, housing, employment, and appropriate leisure time.
