The Faces of Human Rights

In 2018, when the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR) was celebrated, many events and publications examined its relevance in the contemporary human rights agenda. The Faces of Human Rights was conceived both as a celebration of the UDHR and a tribute to those individuals who laid the groundwork for that document and, more generally, developed our current conceptions of human rights through their various distinguished contributions to the field: as academics, civil servants, civil society activists, judges, lawmakers, philosophers, politicians, and so on. The inspiration for the project was born in a meeting of the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) executive committee in Brussels in February 2018 and the contributors are drawn predominantly from the wealth of human rights academics across the AHRI network.Through these pages, we seek to recall the reasons why human rights are so essential to the post-Second World War peace and how the flame that is human dignity continues to burn and move individuals to act in its pursuit. It is through this reflection that we recall that behind the UDHR, the many additional human rights treaties, the bureaucracy, the struggle and the
heartbreak are the people who have fought to maintain the inherent self-worth and freedoms of every human, and continue to do so, one cause, one speech, one article, one conversation, one kind word at a time.