United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outlines the Obama administration's agenda for human rights in the 21st century during a speech at Georgetown University's Gaston Hall.
She links human rights to broader efforts to promote stable democracies abroad. Secretary Clinton says that the United States should hold itself to the same standards as it holds other countries and must find innovative approaches to secure human rights.
Bio
Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama.
She was a United States Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. She was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2008 election.
(born Oct. 26, 1947, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) U.S. lawyer, first lady, and politician. She attended Wellesley College and Yale Law School, from which she graduated first in her class. Her early professional interests focused on family law and children's rights. In 1975 she married her Yale classmate Bill Clinton, and she became first lady of Arkansas on his election as governor in 1979. She was twice named one of America's 100 most influential lawyers by the National Law Journal. When her husband became president (1993), she wielded power and influence almost unprecedented for a first lady. As head of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, she proposed the first national health-care program in the U.S. but saw the initiative defeated. In 2000 she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, thereby becoming the first wife of a president to win elective office; she was reelected in 2006. Clinton sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 but lost the closely contested race to Barack Obama. In 2009 she became secretary of state in President Obama's administration.
Rights that belong to an individual as a consequence of being human. The term came into wide use after World War II, replacing the earlier phrase “natural rights,” which had been associated with the Greco-Roman concept of natural law since the end of the Middle Ages. As understood today, human rights refer to a wide variety of values and capabilities reflecting the diversity of human circumstances and history. They are conceived of as universal, applying to all human beings everywhere, and as fundamental, referring to essential or basic human needs. Human rights have been classified historically in terms of the notion of three “generations” of human rights. The first generation of civil and political rights, associated with the Enlightenment and the English, American, and French revolutions, includes the rights to life and liberty and the rights to freedom of speech and worship. The second generation of economic, social, and cultural rights, associated with revolts against the predations of unregulated capitalism from the mid-19th century, includes the right to work and the right to an education. Finally, the third generation of solidarity rights, associated with the political and economic aspirations of developing and newly decolonized countries after World War II, includes the collective rights to political self-determination and economic development. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, many treaties and agreements for the protection of human rights have been concluded through the auspices of the United Nations, and several regional systems of human rights law have been established. In the late 20th century ad hoc international criminal tribunals were convened to prosecute serious human rights violations and other crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The International Criminal Court, which came into existence in 2002, is empowered to prosecute crimes against humanity, crimes of genocide, and war crimes.
