UN UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

THE UN UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS—the first international legal instrument that formulated the fundamental civil, political, and socio-economic human rights. It was adopted and proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The day of its adoption—December 10—was declared Human Rights Day (see Human Rights Day).

The USSR and the Ukrainian SSR abstained during the Declaration’s adoption. In the Soviet Union, the text of the Declaration was published in small print runs and only in specialized publications. From the mid-1960s, the Declaration began to be widely circulated in samizdat, and its typewritten copies were repeatedly confiscated from dissidents during searches. Appeals to the articles of the Declaration proclaiming rights and freedoms (the right to receive and disseminate information regardless of state borders, the right to emigrate, the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association) became a leitmotif for the documents and actions of the human rights movement in the USSR. The editors of “A Chronicle of Current Events” chose Article 19 of the Declaration as the epigraph for their bulletin: “Everyone has the right to freedom of conviction and its free expression; this right includes the freedom to hold one’s convictions without interference and the freedom to seek, receive, and disseminate information and ideas through any means and regardless of state borders.”