In the second half of the 20th century, the growth of interest in Essay

In the second half of the 20th century, the growth of interest in human rights has been accompanied by a revival in natural law. Consider why this should be so - Essay Example Indeed, the cinema is the best medium to illustrate how human rights are wantonly violated all over the world. Such films force everyone to fling their cloaks of apathy and go down from their ivory towers and make a stand or a reaction to such abuses. Practically all rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were violated i.e. "the rights to life, liberty, and security of person; to freedom from arbitrary arrest; to a fair trial; to be presumed innocent until proved guilty; to freedom of movement and residence; to asylum, nationality, and ownership of property" and so on.1 The Last King of Scotland, meanwhile, illustrates how a demented ruler, so intoxicated in his powers, can heap so much suffering and destruction to everyone who crosses his path. Idi Amin of Uganda in the 1970's ruled as a dictator and "forced most of the Asians who lived in Uganda to leave the country and had many of his opponents massacred".2 One scene showed his Scottish doctor-adviser hanged on a tenterhook with the hook piercing his chest. 2 The Killing Fields is Cambodia's version of Europe's holocaust. Like the Schindler's List, there's gore galore and human rights abuses to the max. It's so poignant and compelling that critic Rex Reed was made to comment i.e. "no film in my memory has more harrowingly telegraphed the ravages of war than The Killing Fields".3 The most affecting scenes are the scenes of torture ; the one where emaciated Cambodians had to eat live lizards in order to survive and the one where fathers and mothers were mercilessly slaughtered by their brainwashed children. The Killing Fields saga is faithful to history as attested by Amnesty International USA and by the Genocide Studies Program of Yale University. Says the latter "The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the population) was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century".4 It further continued, "the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder in a massive scale". One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was transported to the screen from the novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Russian Nobel Prize winner in Literature novelist, was himself incarcerated in the same gulag that he wrote about and thus his tale was almost biographical. The gulag or a "network of forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union"5 was a symbol of Russian brutality and godlessness during that communist regime. The character Ivan represented the suffering of those who had to do "hard, manual work for 12