A good compendium of readings for someoneinterested in the serious study of humanrights. It was used as a textbook in aclass at the University of Maryland.The appendix includes several importanthuman rights documents.

There are few books you can describe as "the basic text", but this is certainly one of them. It should be required reading in every international law class in the world, but alas it is only required in a few hundred of the tens of thousands going on an any given time. Weston and his collection of authors are all looking for ways of makikng thhe international legal system a truly functional order for the governance of otherwise anarchic inter-state relations. Weston's pulled together the very best, some of which are classics, and a few of which were really undiscovered until he came along and plucked the writing and his/her writing from academic obscruity. This book need not be the sole province of the law student -- it is equally useful to the current practitoners.