Introduction: human rights, equality and education: Mike Cole

As currently formulated, the concept of ‘human rights’ is a comparatively recent phenomenon.The President of the United Nations General Assembly, Dr E.H. Evatt, observed at the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948 that this was ‘the first occasion on which the organised world community had recognised the existence of human rights and fundamental freedoms transcending the laws of sovereign states’ (Laqueur and Rubin, 1979, cited in Osler and Starkey, 1996, p. 2).