Others, far too many others, find that they are greeted with disbelief and hostility, and treated as parasites.It is a view that prevails in the government's proposed new Asylum Bill which intends to deprive refugees of cash benefits and disperse them around the country while their claims are assessed.Among the Medical Foundation's objections to the bill, we see the "no cash" provision as dehumanising - imagine not being able to pay for public transport, public conveniences or a bag of sweets for the kids - while the dispersal plans will inevitably be to the detriment of many torture survivors who need the specialist care of the Medical Foundation.The proposed bill is evidence that even in the developed world, governments fall short of the sentiments expressed in the declaration adopted by the UN's General Assembly on December 10, 1948.But it is only when a government embraces those principles that make real demands that a nation's true commitment to human rights can be measured.Helen Bamber OBE is founder/director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Victorians could believe sincerely in the coming of universal peace. As our century draws to a close, we have instead learned to live with the idea that as one war ends, another begins. The worst war that anyone had ever known secreted in the peace treaties of 1919 the 55 million dead, the bitter moral choices, the vast cruelty and genocide of World War Two. The victims were still not counted when the next war opened, a half century of tense border manoeuvres in the heart of Europe and of real fury in places not covered by our balance of peace and terror: Korea, Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile... Helen Bamber saw that war begin from the plains of Northwest Germany around Belsen in the first two winters after the liberation.

And since the end of that misnamed "cold" war, she has seen new conflicts spring up out of the wreckage of the multinational states preserved by communism, and of African states devised at Congresses in remote European capitals. One of our common fantasies, when we think of the violence of "peacetime" history since 1945, is to imagine ourselves as a foreign correspondent or a spy: informed, detached, indulging now and then in flashes of sentimental anger. The heroes we have made for ourselves in that time are often blankly reflective or indifferent observers of reality: at worst like Camus's stranger killing his anonymous Arab, at best the sceptic drawn into a web of deceit and making the best of it. It's a hard world, and it is reassuring to imagine ourselves negotiating it without ever quite losing the plot.There were people after the war, however, and Bamber was one of them, who challenged this fantasy. They could not, when it came to it, behave like normal adults and get on with their lives, even though their lives were more comfortable than any previous generation had dared to imagine. Normal people are not really meant to concern themselves with what they cannot change; and we are encouraged to be suspicious of declarations, but for a woman like Bamber, who had seen the aftermath of genocide, the UN Declaration of Human Rights was more than words on a page. She is a literalist, as is Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, or Inge Kemp-Genefke, the doctor who runs the International Research and Rehabilitation Centre for Torture in Copenhagen.If every war produces its revisionists, its losers who discover, like Hitler, that they can at least speak the rage of loss and defeat, it also produces these idealists who find something about themselves in the idea that there must never again be such atrocity, that we have now done enough harm.

Their voices have grown more urgent in our century as the distinction between civilian and combatant has vanished, and the forced identification of citizen and state has become systematic, whether in Nazi Germany or Saddam's Iraq. In the deliberately prolonged panic of emergency, the doubtful citizen becomes a security problem, his or her body a field of violence.The Declaration of Human Rights was meant to consign such discussions to an uncivilised past. It is an astonishing text, a vision of a world ruled by social democrats guaranteeing all the great negative liberties of bourgeois civilisation but also educating and protecting those whose lack of endowments makes freedom relatively meaningless. It even includes among its rights the right to a world "in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised" - in which its own words can become real.