'The despotic power of husbands.'.

• Author: Perutz, M.F.
• Position: Protection of women's rights

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"...