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(c) universal respect for, and observance, of human rights and fundamental freedoms for allwithout distinction as to race, sex, language or religion (Article 55).In 1950 Hersch Lauterpacht commented on the Charter’s human rights provisions.Members of the United Nations are under a legal obligation to act in accordance with thesePurposes. It is their legal duty to respect and observe fundamental human rights and freedoms.These provisions are no mere embellishment of a historic document; they were not the result ofan afterthought or an accident of drafting. They were adopted, with deliberation and afterprolonged discussions before and during the San Francisco Conference, as part of the philosophyof the new international system and as a most compelling lesson of the experience of theinadequacies and dangers of the old (pages 147-148).The binding nature of the Charter’s human rights provisions has been repeatedlyconfirmed by the most eminent jurists. Even before 1950 they were recognised as bindingby the most senior North American judges. Two joint judgments in the 1948 US SupremeCourt case of Oyama v California relied on these provisions.Moreover, this nation has recently pledged itself through the United Nations Charter to promoterespect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinctionas to race, sex, language or religion (Justices Murphy and Rutledge).… we have recently pledged ourselves to co-operate with the United Nations to ‘promote …universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all withoutdistinction as to race, sex, language or religion’. How can this nation be faithful to thisinternational pledge if state laws which bar land ownership and occupancy by aliens on accountof race are permitted to be enforced? (Justices Black and Douglas).In 1945 the High Court of Ontario relied upon the human rights provisions of theCharter as part of the public policy of Canada in refusing to enforce covenants based onracial origin (In re Drummond Wren page 781).The prohibition of racial discrimination soon found further expression in the 1948Universal Declaration of Human Rights, providing ‘an authoritative guide … to theinterpretation of the provisions in the Charter’ (Brownlie 1990 page 571).… the indirect legal effect of the Declaration is not to be underestimated, and it is frequentlyregarded as part of the ‘law of the United Nations’ (Brownlie 1990 page 571).Article 1 of the Universal Declaration provides in part that ‘All human beings areborn free and equal in dignity and rights’. Indigenous Australians did not enjoy this rightuntil at least the late 1960s and even later in Western Australia and Queensland (Markus1988 page 56).