Excerpt:
The United Nations would have us forget all about the idea of inalienable rights with which all individuals are endowed by their Creator. The UN wants us to forget the idea that government was established for the purpose of securing these rights, not to create them with the power to take them away. Such ideas are so old-fashioned, after all. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, were written in the eighteenth century. The United Nations believes it has a much more modern idea.
Free speech is a "gift given to us by the [Universal] Declaration of Human Rights," said Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations Jan Eliasson during a press conference on October 2nd at UN headquarters in New York. It is "a privilege," Eliasson said, "that we have, which in my view involves also the need for respect, the need to avoid provocations."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of normative principles adopted by a majority of the member states of the UN. It gave rise to legally enforceable UN human rights treaties that embodied its core principles, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.