Universal Declaration of Human Rights: what if we were updating it today?

With the Global Citizenship Committee due to hold its inaugural meeting in Edinburgh, we the public have been invited to contribute thoughts on this question.  Here in Edinburgh, in the Ethics Forum hosted by the Just World Institute, we have been contributing to the debate in the run-up to the event.  My own contribution is four interconnected suggestions of what should be included if the Declaration were being drafted or amended now: 1) rights and duties regarding the environment should be explicitly mentioned; 2) the significance of the fact we live in a crowded planet should be foregrounded in the preamble; 3) the limits to the justification of property in general, and intellectual property in particular, should be more clearly stated; 4) the point that human rights set standards of right and wrong conduct should be emphasised against possessive individualist interpretations of rights as ‘things’.  See a summary of the reasoning behind the suggestions.