Research

[Dick Ramey <DICKRAMEY@AOL.COM>]

     I am a debate coach and a Librarian at Mooresville HS in Indiana. This
will probably not affect most of you, but there are some of you that have
debaters that come into the Library and do research.
     The National Forensic League topic and the state Federation topics will
switch in January and go to Human Rights.
     The documents that they will need to locate are from the Universal Human
Rights Declaration of 1948 and the Vienna World Human Rights Conference of
1993. If any of you think the US Government is bureaucratic, believe
me,,,,,,,we have NOTHING ON THE UN. They have more departments than anything
I have seen.
     The reason why I am writing is, because I have spent nearly 70 hours on
the net researching the topic and there is one keypoint that can save you and
your students hours of research. The students will be coming in wanting
UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS as opposed to the plain ordinary human rights (so I
thought). Well,,,,,,,,
1. the only document that says Universal Human Rights is the 1948 document,
but
2. all other UN conferences and commissions have as a part of their
     ratification the support/vote/ratification of the UN UHR of 1948, so
3. they have interlocked a ton of documents (bureaucratic) into the support
of the
     Universal Human Rights document of 1948.

     I had Political Research of Dallas, Tex. (Clements and Taylor's
Encyclopedia of Gov. Officials) do research for me.
     From both their research and mine, I have found that there is
conflicting documentation as to if the US signed the original document in
1948 (MAJOR RESEARCH POINT (sudents will look, look, and find very little (if
anything) on the name of the countries ratifying the 1948 agreement).
 Literally, you could (and I did) spend hours trying to find the answer. The
research question can be answered by the interlocking documents. We may/or
may not have signed the original document in 1948,,,,,,,but WE DID VOTE for
the 1993 Vienna document which did ratify the 1948 document. I am writing,
because this item will save you hours of research,

sorry to use the listserv for this,
thank you
Dick Ramey
Mooresville HS IND. - ISTC-Library