Amnesty International Publish Children's Book

Doctor Who star David Tennant has written the foreword for a book celebrating the 60th birthday of the Declaration of Human Rights.

We Are All Born Free is a picture book published by Amnesty International celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Artists and illustrators from all over the world have offered their personal interpretation of the Articles included in the Declaration, making them easy to understand for young readers. Children aged 6 and over will take great pleasure in discovering the lavish illustrations that accompany each Article.

“There are so many of us humans squeezing on to this wee planet and there’s no Tardis coming to spirit us away,” wrote the Scottish actor. “We need to look after each other. The declaration inspired the founding of Amnesty. It represented such a simple idea: that everyone everywhere deserved to be treated fairly. The UDHR reads like a list of common sense – maybe everyone should have a copy pinned up in their bedroom.”

Other contributors include Polly Dunbar, Chris Riddell, and Debi Gliori.

‘Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," said Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK. “An attempt to learn from the horrors of the Second World War, the UDHR set out for the first time the fundamental rights to which everyone, everywhere is entitled. It inspired the founding of Amnesty International, which now has more than a quarter of a million members and supporters in the UK and over two million worldwide, and campaigns to abolish the death penalty and end torture, for the release of all prisoners of conscience, to control the arms trade and to stop violence against women. The world of 2008 needs the UDHR just as much as the world of 1948 and this book puts the UDHR’s importance into sharp focus with a series of stunning drawings from some of the world’s most famous illustrators.”

The book is available in 30 languages from the Amnesty International website.