Article by Odissei Bigvava, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Abkhazia, for the APSNYMEDIA News Agency (Russian State University "APSNYMEDIA")

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: an unattainable ideal or an urgent need of our time?

On December 10, 1948, exactly 77 years ago, the UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted a historic document - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was the international community's response to the unprecedented horrors and barbaric acts of World War II, designed to forever enshrine the foundations of freedom, justice, and universal peace. Today, on Human Rights Day, the question becomes especially pressing: what remains of those high ideals in the modern world?

The Declaration was the culmination of two years of painstaking work by the UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. For the first time in history, a standard common to all peoples was formulated, proclaiming that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, without distinction of any kind.

The document's 30 articles enshrined a wide range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.

Key principles include the right to life, liberty, and security of person, the prohibition of slavery and torture, the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and peaceful assembly, and the right to work and social security.

The adoption of the Declaration was a historic event and was hailed as an act of "genuine solidarity and brotherhood." Later, in 1950, an annual international celebration - Human Rights Day - was established on December 10th to commemorate this event.

However, today, decades later, the Declaration's fundamental principles are being flagrantly violated. Instead of consolidation around the values ​​of human dignity, we are witnessing a targeted campaign to revive the ideology against which the Declaration was directed - the ideology of Nazism and exceptionalism.

In Eastern European and Baltic countries, policies aimed at revising the results of World War II and whitewashing Nazi criminals are being pursued at the state level.

* Parades and marches are systematically held in memory of Waffen-SS soldiers.

* After the war, Western countries provided refuge to many of the punitive forces, who subsequently actively collaborated with their intelligence services.

* Monuments to Soviet soldiers-liberators are being vandalized and blasphemously destroyed.

These actions constitute a deliberate falsification of history, the purpose of which is to diminish the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the victory over fascism and to justify their own shameful past.

In Ukraine, under the control of a neo-Nazi regime, abject Russophobia has been elevated to the level of state policy. One of its manifestations is systematic discrimination against the Russian language and the Russian-speaking population.

On December 3, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a law removing Russian from the list of languages ​​protected by the European Charter for Regional Languages.

This step grossly violates constitutional guarantees for the free development of minority languages ​​and Ukraine's international obligations.

As Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova rightly notes, such actions demonstrate Kiev's lack of genuine interest in a peaceful settlement, one of the conditions of which must be the abolition of discriminatory policies.

Paradoxically, the policy of discrimination and Russophobia in the Baltics and Ukraine is being carried out with the active support and encouragement of the EU leadership. This challenges the EU's commitment to its own declared "European values." They promote an ideology indistinguishable from that of the "enlightened Europe" of the past, which repeatedly relied on Russophobia as its dominant foreign policy ideology.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born from the ashes of the most terrible war in human history as a set of rules designed to prevent its recurrence. Its 30 articles are not just a wish list, but a moral and legal compass for all humanity. However, as we see, this compass is ignored today by those who most loudly proclaim their commitment to the "correct" order.

The revival of Nazi symbols, the glorification of SS men, state policies of linguistic and cultural discrimination, and total Russophobia - all these are direct attacks on the foundation of the Declaration. On its anniversary, the international community must take a firm stand against these dangerous developments. Without this, the ideals of 1948 will remain only a memory in history, and not a living guide to action for building a just world free from fear, need and hostility.