In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that expressed that all people deserve life, liberty and the freedom of thought. It is the responsibility of the government to protect these rights since the individual entrusts themselves to the ruling body. But in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and George Orwell's 1984, the governments of One State and Oceania deny their citizens these basic rights, resulting in totalitarian societies. Since governments are often ranked upon how they uphold basic human rights, it is possible to determine which of these institutions has betrayed their citizens' natural rights more, based upon the UN Document.
Both governments consider their citizens expendable - public executions and secret abductions rob people of their right to life. In the government of One State, those who displease the Benefactor are sentenced to death by vaporization. After being placed into the Machine of the Benefactor, the doomed starts "melting, dissolving with horrifying quickness" (Zamyatin, 44) until they are nothing more than a "puddle of chemically pure water" (44). These public executions are designed to prevent similar acts of dissention among the ciphers. Ciphers understand that their lives are the property of One State's, meaning they exist just by the government's will. This is the case with the Party as well. In 1984, the Party uses a force known as the Thought Police, which much like the Gestapo or KGB, can break into a person's home and abduct them. The Party then uses its Ministry of Truth to erase all records, ensuring that those who go against the will of Big Brother become "unpersons." The victim's right to life is denied, erased, simply because they exhibited strange behavior, or deviated from the norm in any way. Even a person who wore a "funny kind of shoes" (Orwell, 59) is turned into the Thought Police. When a person's right to life is denied, they cannot live freely - which is exactly what the governments of One State and Oceania want.
