Film
Philip French
Soon after the birth of cinema moviemakers became crusaders for and proponents of human rights. The American pioneer Edwin S Porter followed his milestone western The Great Train Robbery (1903) with a hard-hitting film about equality before the law. In his The Kleptomaniac (1905), a wealthy woman and a poor working-class mother are arrested for shoplifting, the former treated with respect and acquitted, the latter treated as a criminal and jailed. The first great American film, DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), the most racially prejudiced film produced outside Nazi Germany, made heroes of the Ku Klux Klan for their virtual restoration of slavery in the Deep South after the Civil War. But Griffith followed it with the even more ambitious and truly admirable Intolerance (1916), which told four parallel stories of injustice from Babylon through the Crucifixion and the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, to the conviction for murder of an innocent blue-collar worker in 20th-century America.
With the coming of sound Hollywood developed a movie genre dealing with human rights, 'the social conscience picture', which in various forms has continued to this day. In the years after the Second World War these pictures were chiefly concerned with issues of racial prejudice: anti-semitism in Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement (both 1947), the imposition of second-class citizenship on blacks in Pinky and Home of the Brave (both 1949). More recently, film-makers have targeted the denial of human and civil rights following 9/11 in such films as The Road to Guantanamo (2006) and Rendition (2007).
Some movies have helped contribute to social change. The popular British film Victim (1961), for instance, speeded up the implementation of homosexual law reform recommended by the Wolfenden Committee. The Polish movie A Short Film About Killing (1988) led directly to the suspension, then abolition, of capital punishment in Poland, an influence unprecedented in a communist country.
A similar courage is to be found in the work of those Iranian directors who have challenged censors and ayatollahs in a string of pictures criticising the treatment of women in their country, Jafar Panahi's The Circle and Marziyeh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman (both 2000) among them.
No recent picture has so forcefully shown what it is like to live in a country where human and civil rights are denied or arbitrarily accorded by the government as The Lives of Others (2006), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's picture of life under the constant surveillance of the Stasi in 1980s East Germany. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Of living directors, few can match the record of Richard Attenborough for the vigorous support of human rights both on and off the screen. One thinks especially of the brave movie he produced and appeared in about a trade unionist victimised by communist leaders in The Angry Silence (1960), and of two he directed - the magnificent cinebiography Gandhi (1982) and his film about Steve Biko and the anti-apartheid movement, Cry Freedom (1987). One hopes Attenborough will live to realise his dream of making a film about that great proponent of freedom and social justice Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man.
Pop
Kitty Empire
Human rights have always had a backbeat. Since a cave-dweller first put antelope femur to skin drum, songs have yearned for whatever people have lacked. Abundant prey, a good harvest, freedom from harm - fundamental versions of what we have since enshrined as basic human rights.
Folk music has long had a crusading role in Anglophone society, documenting the plight of the downtrodden and inveighing against tyranny. Around the world, every human population has its own version, in which discontents are articulated and justice is longed for. To enumerate only the briefest highlights would take up most of The Observer's column inches this week. To explore properly the interfaces of music and humanist concerns - Band Aid, War Child, Make Trade Fair, Sting's support for Amazonian tribespeople, the works of Bono -would take a month of Sundays.
Instead, consider this spur-of-the-moment, idiosyncratic and personal Top of the Human Rights Pops.
At Number Three, Tori Amos with 'Cornflake Girl'. Amos's 1994 single made it to No 4 in the UK charts. To this day, few realise that it is about the horrors of female circumcision, and the betrayal of daughters by their own mothers in the name of tradition and social cohesion.
At Number Two, Billie Holiday, 'Strange Fruit'. Originally a poem by a Jewish teacher from New York, 'Strange Fruit' is a visually sumptuous song about the lynching of black men in the American South. Pre-dating the Civil Rights movement and inspiring Bob Dylan, it is still chilling today.
At Number One, Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'. Incredibly, every North American schoolchild learns this song, in which folk scion and Communist sympathiser Guthrie takes a magic realist stroll through the American landscape, asserting communal ownership of the land in a way Native Americans might have understood. The beauty and bounty of the continent, Guthrie implies, should be shared by all its inhabitants, banishing hunger, want, and subjugation. The equality of all who live there is a moot point. There are two even more political verses, little sung, decrying mass unemployment and private property. Even without these, 'This Land Is Your Land' is a deeply powerful, subliminal hymn of egalitarianism nestled in the very bosom of the deeply unequal, free-market Dark Star.
Books
Jonathan Heawood
With a neat sense of timing, George Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four just a week before the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948. While Eleanor Roosevelt's committee produced the template for a better future, Orwell was busy imagining the alternative - a world without individual rights, where freedom and autonomy become illusions manufactured by an all-seeing, all-powerful state. He reminded generations of readers that our rights require vigilance and personal sacrifice if they are to be worth more than the paper they're written on.
Orwell's legacy lives on in novels from Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) - better known as the film Blade Runner - to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985), in which a dystopian future society is used to explore the absence of human rights. In both books, a class of being (androids, women) is categorised as subhuman, and therefore unworthy of the same rights as others and they convey a sense of the universality of rights more powerfully than any legal tract.
Great novels such as Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) or JM Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983) may not namecheck the declaration, but their profound sense of injustice is animated by its promise of a better world.
Wherever novelists evoke the plight of the individual floundering in an unjust world, human rights are at risk. These novels bring us face to face with the real meaning of universal values as they apply to individual lives.
Human-rights abuses over the past 60 years have not been confined to fiction. In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Alexander Solzhenitsyn described the horrors of his own imprisonment in a Soviet labour camp, and collected the testimony of 227 fellow survivors. The book led to his exile from the Soviet Union, but it opened up the hidden tragedy of millions of political prisoners to the eyes of the world. The sheer weight of historical record, and the ironic power of his writing, which is often surprisingly humorous, emphasised the brutality inherent in the Soviet system. Many people refused to believe his account when it was published. Now we know the truth to have been far worse.
In Wild Swans (1991), Jung Chang showed how the abuse of rights can carry its pain right to the heart of the family, with a knock-on effect down the generations. With a similar emphasis on the fate of women, Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis (2000) introduced the world to the tortured history of freedom in Iran. And Orhan Pamuk's strange, magical novel Snow (2002) exploded the myth of Turkish multiculturalism. It is no accident that these authors have suffered censorship and worse in their home countries. States that don't respect rights don't respect writers.
Philosophers such as John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), and Ronald Dworkin, in Taking Rights Seriously (1977), have helped to bring the idea of fundamental rights into the legal mainstream, but it is the great novelists and memoirists of the past 60 years who have done most to embed human rights in the global consciousness. Most people will never read the declaration. They will never know how deeply their rights are being abused by their rulers. But if they read Wild Swans they get an overwhelming sense of what it means to live without rights. This is the first time in human history that international law has existed to defend the powerless against the powerful. But the great literature of this period is accurate in its reflection of a world which has more in common with Orwell's nightmares than the UN's dreams.
· Jonathan Heawood is the director of English PEN
Architecture
Stephen Bayley
Modern architecture does not readily lend itself to campaigning, though modern technology made human rights possible. Item one: without the fax machine there would have been no glasnost. The truth makes you free and the clunking fax (created pre-internet so that time-shifted Japanese salarymen could receive written messages) was truth's tireless runner. Item two: the Land-Rover, like the declaration, a product of 1948, has been a liberating tool on every continent.
But there is a small handful of buildings which work as the architecture of memory and remind us of what's at stake when freedoms become compromised. On the Ile de la Cité in Paris, Georges-Henri Pingusson built his haunting Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in 1962. It is a deafeningly silent and exquisite memorial to the 200,000 (mostly) Jews forced out of Paris during the Second World War.
There is Daniel Libeskind's 2001 Jewish Museum on Berlin's Lindenstrasse. A concrete structure with dramatic zinc cladding, its zig-zag plan looks like a diagram of angst ... and a vital sign of resurrection. Sombre, but ultimately optimistic, it makes a wonderful contrast to Beijing's appalling Great Hall of the People, an inhuman horror completed in 1959 by what the communists are pleased to call 'volunteers', but we might more accurately call ideologic and economic slaves.
But if human rights needs a single monument, let's choose Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle, completed last year just outside Cologne. The Brother Klaus Field Chapel is named after a 15th-century mystic who farmed hereabouts. In his memory Zumthor has created one of the 21st century's undisputed masterpieces. Making a sort of wigwam of wood, he slowly built layer upon layer upon it. He then set fire to the wood leaving a strange charred, sculptural internal effect. A molten lead floor is lit by an oculus. It is beautiful, peaceful, mysterious and life-enhancing. Aren't these the qualities human rights are for?