Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in Paris at three o'clock on the morning of December 10th, 1948, at least a third of the member countries of the United Nations have used torture. In Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo, the former Yugoslavia and many other places, the most savage violence has been unleashed on civilians.
Slavery - in the form of forced child labour and of the sex industry's trafficking in women and children - has been a daily reality for millions. About 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Each day, 35,000 children die from the effects of poverty. It is all too easy to survey the 50 years since the Declaration was signed and to declare it a well-intentioned failure.
Yet that failure has to be judged against two things - the originality of the Declaration and the scale of the task it was meant to accomplish. The rights it enunciates have become so familiar a part of today's political rhetoric that it is hard to remember how new and bold the document as a whole really is. The historical odds against success are so great that the real wonder is that it is has succeeded at all.
It is not that there are no historical precedents for the Declaration's basic idea that human rights are not granted as a favour by a gracious government or conferred by membership of a particular religion, ethnic group, caste or political persuasion. It is just that those precedents stand out as shining exceptions.
We can look back to the remarkable code of laws enacted by Hammurabi, King of Babylon over 4,000 years ago. We can evoke the memory of the great Dominican friar Bartolomeo de Las Casas in the early 16th century, furiously asserting that the Indians of Latin America had the same human rights as their Spanish conquerors. We can remember two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, struggling in the Westminster parliament of the 1780s to impeach the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, for his crimes against the natives. We can read the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French Revolution.
But these are rare moments, not permanent achievements. Much more typical is the outrage that sounds through history when people who have been wronged claim that their treatment violates, not their common humanity, but some special status. Even in the New Testament, that great assertion of human dignity, Saint Paul, defending himself against arbitrary arrest and cruel punishment, appeals to his rights "as a Roman citizen".
Time and again, Paul's appeal as been echoed by those who claim "the rights of an Englishman", the dignity due to a Christian, the protection that should be afforded to a true Muslim or, as in the case of the Irish in 19th century America, the right to be treated as white folks rather than as black slaves.
The best way of stopping someone from abusing, torturing or killing you has been to deflect the hatred onto someone else. Directly or indirectly, the demand for justice for oneself has tended to imply that you wouldn't really mind being mistreated if you were a Jew, a black, a Christian, a native, a foreigner, a woman, or whoever else it is respectable to despise.
THE Universal Declaration is an attempt to banish that kind of thinking for good. One of the things that makes it so radical is that it doesn't just try to outlaw injustice, it also tries to change the terms on which the oppressed will demand justice. Its basic promise is that the cry for protection does not have to strike the right ethnic or religious or racial or sexual note in order to be heard. It just has to be a human cry.
This immense change was forced by a realisation that suffering, abuse and violence are not the property of any one group. The Declaration, in that sense, is a product of the world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The first draft was written by the French lawyer, Rene Cassin, who had been wounded in the first World War, lived through the failure of international justice as French delegate to the League of Nations and fled France when the Nazis invaded.
The process of creating the Declaration was driven, too, by Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman who, in spite of her privileged position as the former First Lady of the United States, was deeply marked by her experience of discrimination against women, by the poverty of Depression-era America, by an awareness of the racial injustice that persisted even in a law-bound democracy such as the US and by an experience of the vast diversity of humanity that poured into her native land.
Cassin, as a French delegate to the Conference on International Organisation that was established after the war to draft a charter for the UN, insisted that the League of Nations had failed because it had never seriously addressed the question of human rights. The UN would likewise fail, he believed, if it did not so from the beginning. Largely through his influence, the conference agreed to establish a Commission on Human Rights.
Roosevelt, elected as Chairwoman of the Commission, played a critical role, not just in pushing the Declaration through, but in making sure that it was written in clear, direct language that would be accessible to ordinary people everywhere. "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?" she asked. "In small places close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world."
Together with Cassin and Roosevelt, the critical figures in the shaping of the declaration were Peng-chun Chang of China, Charles Malik of Lebanon and the Canadian John Humphrey. Between them, they brought together a range of cultural and political backgrounds that helped to create a document that could transcend any one perspective.
Just as importantly, though, these people knew that the declaration they were forging would have to find its way in a world that was then becoming more and more divided between communism and capitalism. It is, ironically, this bitter division which gives the Declaration its other revolutionary quality. For what they tried to do was to fuse two conflicting notions of rights: the capitalist world's emphasis on the rights of the individual and the socialist or communist world's insistence on the over-riding importance of society.
The true boldness of the Declaration lies in its attempt to bring together two kinds of freedom - freedom from and freedom to. Some of its provisions are essentially negative, intended to stop human beings from being arbitrarily killed, tortured, enslaved, degraded, denied a fair trial or oppressed for their religious or political beliefs.
Others are essentially positive, aimed at improving the lot of the mass of humanity. They address the social and economic conditions that are necessary to make someone fully human - an adequate standard of living, a decent education, time to rest and enjoy life, and the ability to participate in local and national communities.
For most of the Cold War, however, there was a tendency for the opposite sides in that conflict to pick and choose among the full range of rights guaranteed by the Declaration. In 1966, for example, the UN adopted two international agreements intended to put legal flesh on the bones of the Declaration. One, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, was signed by the Soviet Union but not by the US. The other, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, was signed by the US but not by the Soviet Union.
This refusal to see the Declaration as a whole is what has led to its worst failures.
Pro-Soviet dictatorships could insist that in order for the social rights endorsed in the Declaration to be upheld, it was sadly necessary to limit the freedoms of the misguided individuals who stood in the way. Pro-American dictatorships could insist that the preservation of individual freedom unfortunately necessitated the obliteration of those who were demanding their social rights.
Only now, with the Cold War over, is it possible to get back to the central insight of the Declaration - that civil and political rights cannot survive in a climate of social and economic injustice, and that social justice cannot be founded on the abuse of the individual.
Perhaps, in that sense, tomorrow should be regarded not as the 50th anniversary of the Declaration but as a second chance, an opportunity to start again in the spirit of 1948.