Critical analysis of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as instituted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Abstract

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first instrument of the resort to address human rights and entitlements comprehensively. Other human rights instruments later adopted, cited it as a precedent. This paper uses an Interpretive Phenomenology Analysis (IPA); it is an approach to qualitative research with an idiographic focus and aims to offer insights into how a given person, in each context, makes sense of a given phenomenon. It has its theoretical origins in phenomenology and hermeneutics, and key ideas from Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For the purposes of this paper, only literature sources were used to substantiate the argument. A key conclusion of this paper is that religious intolerance forms the basis of much other intolerance which could lead to human rights abuses, ideological polarization, lawlessness, homophobia, bigotry, tribalism, and hate speech.