The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is a United Nations agency that works to promote and protect the human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The office was established by the UN General Assembly on 20 December 1993 in the wake of the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.
The office is headed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who co-ordinates human rights activities throughout the UN System and supervises the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland. The current High Commissioner is South African lawyer Navanethem Pillay, whose four-year term began on 1 September 2008.
As of 2008, the agency had a budget of US$120m and 1,000 employees based in Geneva. It is an Ex-Officio member of the Committee of the United Nations Development Group.
Read more about Office Of The United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights: High Commissioners For Human Rights
Famous quotes containing the words office of the, office of, office, united, nations, high, human and/or rights:
“The office of the Vice-President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“Notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Reason is, and only ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.”
—Edwin Muir (1887–1959)
“I’m for a high libido president! I applaud him if he gets up and picks up women.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, be infringed.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)