Protecting the Essentials - Reaffirming Human Rights in a Precarious Time

UNHS Blog Post                                                                              Human Rights Day 2025

by Luisa Hofmann & Beatrice Hart-Brown

On this Human Rights Day, the UN’s reminder that human rights are “our everyday essentials” is more than a theme. It is both a warning and hope because in today’s world these essentials often feel fragile, too distant, unachievable and something we increasingly lose appreciation for.

We live in an age of multiplying conflicts, more than at any point since the end of the Second World War. Entire communities are uprooted, children grow up in rubble and beneath the shadow of drones, sieges, bombed-out hospitals and schools now characterise what once were neighbourhoods and millions flee without knowing if a border will mean safety or further peril. In recent months, the world has watched grave violations and catastrophic conflicts unfold: Sudan, Myanmar, Palestine, Mozambique, the DRC, Ukraine are only some of the examples that should not exist. Bombings, mass displacement, genocide, starvation, enforced disappearance and persecution threaten the lives of millions. We see heightened repression in countries like Russia, the US, Israel, Hungary or India and increasingly speaking one’s mind has become a dangerous act. For months elections have been fuelled and determined by hatred, discrimination, racism, nationalist rhetorics, an anti-immigration sentiment and the deflation of democratic norms. While in some places atrocities unfold before the eyes of the world, in other places people suffer alone and in painful silence.

In Europe like everywhere else, political currents shift in troubling ways and more and more commitments to human rights projects are quietly abandoned. Increasingly international institutions – born to protect peace, fight injustice, uphold the rule of law and defend the vulnerable – are questioned, weakened or dismissed by the very states that once championed them. Authoritarian voices gain confidence, the space for civil society contracts, impunity prevails, inequalities are normalised and those who defend rights are threatened or silenced.

Undeniably, we stand in a precarious moment.

And yet, this is precisely why Human Rights Day must matter. It is a reminder that these concepts are not lofty abstractions but the foundations of our daily lives. They are the difference between safety and fear, between opportunity and oppression, between a society that nurtures its people and one that crushes them. They are a difference all of us can make.

Human rights endure not because governments generously bestow them, but because people insist on them – quietly, steadily, sometimes at great risk. As Eleanor Roosevelt reminded us, human rights begin “in small places, close to home”. They begin in classrooms where girls insist on learning, in courtrooms where judges rule without fear, in refugee camps where communities rebuild dignity from dust, in families, in newsrooms, village squares, parliaments and crowded streets where citizens refuse to be silent but choose to stand up for each other. Where the willingness to understand and small acts of kindness overcome selfishness and prejudice. Where we see no disabilities, where love knows no gender, where freedom embraces all religious beliefs, where respect has no skin colour and opportunity belongs to all nationalities.

The birth of the UN and the human rights trajectory are not an enchanting fairytale of progress but a shared aspiration and a continued effort for a better world despite failures and setbacks. Over the decades, international human rights law has expanded, protections for women, children and minorities have grown and global movements from disability rights to climate justice have reshaped what humanity demands of itself. These gains were never inevitable. They were built by countless individuals in every corner of the world who refused to accept that cruelty, discrimination, suffering and hatred ever have a place.

Their courage is our inheritance and our responsibility.

Today, let us affirm this responsibility. Let us insist that no crisis is too distant to deserve concern, no violation too political to condemn and no life too small to protect. Let us centre the voices too often unheard: those in conflict zones, in the Global South and in places where suppression is daily and dignity must be defended anew each morning. As violence endures, new technologies emerge and great challenges materialise, let us protect what makes us human – our collective identity, common safety, communal wellbeing and the mutual freedom to exist without fear.

And above all, let us remember that hope is not naïve. Hope is work. Hope is action. Hope is accountability. Hope is the quiet, persistent belief that our shared humanity is worth defending even when the world grows dark around us.

On this Human Rights Day, we stand with those who cannot stand safely on their own. We recommit to dignity, equality and justice not as aspirations but as everyday essentials.