Fundamental human rights are too closely linked to be rated on a scale of most importance to least important.

If you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, appearing on the next pages of this Guide, you will probably find yourself thinking that some of the rights described are more crucial than others for your well-being. This reaction is rooted in your own history and circumstances. To other people, with different personal histories and living under different conditions, other rights will seem more important. Each right, however, carries great importance for all people. The 30 articles of the Declaration are not organized under particular categories because they are too closely interrelated for such divisions. They are also interdependent, building on one another and reinforcing one another. In other words, human rights are indivisible.

Arguments over which rights are most important raged during the drafting of the Declaration, and controversy continued even within the past decade. Western governments tended to maintain during the cold war that civil and political rights took precedence over economic and social rights. Until its collapse, the Soviet Union and its allies took the opposite position.

In the 1990s, international understanding that basic rights are interdependent and universal has expanded dramatically. States throughout the world have agreed that neither individuals nor governments can be permitted to ignore rights which they may consider inconvenient at particular times or under particular circumstances. And no authorities can justify failure to protect certain rights on grounds that scarce resources must be used to protect rights with "higher priority."

The idea that there are first-priority rights and second-priority rights has proved intolerable to people suffering human rights violations, as well as to people experienced in protecting their own human rights and the human rights of others. They have seen the whole system of human rights begin to unravel when one individual or group is denied basic human rights or when one human right is ignored.

Without freedom of expression, for example, there can be no free press or criticism of government policies. Insulated from the observations of local communities and the reports of independent media, government authorities can continue to implement economically and socially destructive policies. Over and over again, such policies have led to famine, economic collapse, or other disasters.