But the treaty is the most visible manifestation yet of "soft power" - attempting to substitute moral example for the barrel of a gun.And then there is that small matter of a certain ex-dictator, arrested in London at the request of Spain for crimes committed in Chile. In September, tiny Burkina Faso became the 40th country to ratify the international treaty banning landmines, thus ensuring that it will take effect next year. Yes, some of the very largest powers - the US, Russia, China and India - have failed to sign. Last summer, the nations of the world assembled in Rome and approved a treaty setting up a first permanent international criminal court. Half of all governments still routinely jail prisoners of conscience; a third of them employ torture to silence political opposition.
Last but not least, barely one of them actually promotes the Universal Declaration. If you do not know what your rights are, how can you be expected to demand them? But let it be said out loud: for all man's continuing inhumanity to man, 1998 has been a banner year for human rights. Mass graves in Kosovo, yet more barbarity in Algeria, massacres in Afghanistan, harsh political repression in Burma, vicious civil war in Columbia - even the presence of the Dalai Lama at the celebrations in Paris of this anniversary. Each one of them only reminds us how human rights are trampled on across the five continents of a world which professes daily outrage at it. Sir: No better argument for the abolition of the House of Lords exists than your front-page photographs of the Conservative spokespersons who have recently resigned (4 December).
Who are these people? Are they important? RICHARD SLACK London E17. TRULY, THE gods who arrange such things could hardly have laid on a more felicitously timed anniversary. Exactly half a century ago today, the General Assembly of the United Nations gathered at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It might have been a shamefaced occasion, a hypocritical genuflection to those lofty provisions of 1948, mocked by dictators around the globe.