UNITED NATIONS

Art. 1 — We are all born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Art. 2 — Every right applies to everyone, without exception or discrimination.

Art. 3 — Everyone has the right to life, liberty and personal security.

Art. 4 — No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.

Art. 5 — No one shall be subjected to torture or cruel treatment.

Art. 6 — Everyone has the right to be recognised as a person before the law.

Art. 7 — All are equal before the law and entitled to equal protection.

Art. 8 — Everyone has the right to an effective legal remedy when their rights are violated.

Art. 9 — No one shall be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled.

Art. 10 — Everyone is entitled to a fair and public trial.

Art. 11 — Everyone charged with an offence is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Art. 12 — Everyone has the right to privacy - in their home, their correspondence, their family.

Art. 13 — Everyone has the right to move freely within and between countries.

Art. 14 — Everyone has the right to seek asylum from persecution.

Art. 15 — Everyone has the right to a nationality and cannot be arbitrarily stripped of it.

Art. 16 — Everyone has the right to marry and found a family, with free and full consent.

Art. 17 — Everyone has the right to own property and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it.

Art. 18 — Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Art. 19 — Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Art. 20 — Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and association.

Art. 21 — Everyone has the right to take part in the government of their country.

Art. 22 — Everyone has the right to social security and economic, social and cultural rights. Art. 23 — Everyone has the right to work, fair pay and to form trade unions.

Art. 24— Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable working hours.

Art. 25 — Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living — food, housing, healthcare.

Art. 26 — Everyone has the right to education, which shall be free at the elementary level.

Art. 27 — Everyone has the right to participate in cultural life and benefit from scientific progress.

Art. 28 — Everyone is entitled to a social and international order where these rights can be realised.

Art. 29 — We all have duties to the community that make the full development of others possible.

Art. 30 — Nothing in this Declaration may be used to justify destroying the rights within it.

Our Foundation: The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

Everything we do at International Human Rights Global is rooted in one document - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on the 10th of December 1948. Born out of the horrors of World War II, it was humanity's collective promise to itself: never again. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission that drafted it, and what emerged were 30 articles that, for the first time in history, set out the rights that belong to every single person on earth, simply by virtue of being human.

Thirty rights. Thirty promises. And yet, decades later, not one of them is universally upheld.

We believe in all 30. But we are honest enough to know that meaningful change doesn't come from trying to tackle everything at once. It comes from focus - from listening to what people actually need, and directing energy where it matters most right now, in this place, for these people. That is why our work is built around 5 to 7 priority rights per country, selected according to local realities on the ground.

In Europe, the most pressing battles tend to be fought closer to home - unequal access to education, gender-based and domestic violence, discrimination, and the quiet erosion of rights that happens not through dramatic cruelty but through systemic neglect.

In Africa, the frontlines look different - poverty, access to basic healthcare, the right to education for children who have never seen the inside of a classroom, and the fight for political freedoms that much of the world takes for granted.

Same foundation. Same 30 articles. But the work looks different depending on where you stand - and that is exactly the point. We don't impose a universal agenda. We listen, we identify, and we act where it matters most. That is what we call a mission.