Sharon Salzburg is a best-selling author who has written extensively on the subject of Eastern philosophy, specifically Buddhism. Much of her work has been focused on explaining aspects of Buddhism to a Western audience. She has written and taught a great deal on the subject of meditation, for instance. In 1974, Salzberg was one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society, located at Barre in the US state of Massachusetts, a group she initially formed with Jack Kornfield, a teacher of the vipassana movement in American, and Joseph Goldstein. Salzberg would later go on to create the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in 1989, again with Goldstein. In the mid-1990s she also established a long-term meditation retreat centre, again in Barre. However, it is for her writing that she is best known, not least for her 1995 publication, 'Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness'.
At their simplest, human rights are a number of social norms that are in place to protect individuals from one another and larger organisations, such as big businesses or the state. The idea behind them is that no one can take away another person's rights which are said to be inalienable. That means that they cannot be subject to change or altered at the whim of a government or a dictator, for example. The idea of inalienable rights took off after the calamity of the Second World War when many civilians died as well as combatants. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations in 1948, and it still creates much of the legal basis for international monitoring.