Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

On Sunday, December 10th, the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of adoption of the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Today, Dr. Zaid Raad al-Hussein

joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk about the paradox of the declaration, how it is at once so

obvious and also so frequently violated.

A former Jordanian diplomat, Al Hussein, served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014 to 2018,

and now is the president and CEO of the International Peace Institute and a professor of the practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Let's listen.

Zaid, Rod al-Hussein, thank you so much for joining me in Public Health on call to talk about

the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 75 years of trying to achieve the obvious,

so much of what the declaration speaks to is so obvious

and yet so difficult for us to seemingly achieve.

It sets the base, the basis for human civilization, and yet seems to be in so many

respects almost unattainable for us.

And we're trapped between an aspiration, what we ought to be, what we should have been

a long time ago, and the, perhaps the primordial part of our being, the primitive, the underdeveloped part of our nature,

that always snaps us back into something craven and narrow and small as opposed to

...