Managing Editor David Pitts recounts the story of the effort to draft and adopt the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A successful outcome was by no means assured when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights held its first session in January 1947 in New York. Its purpose was the completion of a task never before accomplished in all of human history -- the drafting of a universal declaration of human rights for every man, woman and child on the planet.

From the beginning, those who attended knew the task would not be easy. Differences in ideology, culture and history divided even countries with similar economic and social systems. But in one sense they were united. They all shared a profound moral revulsion over the colossal loss of life in the recently concluded war -- an estimated 50 million people.

In the middle of the 20th century, in the heart of Europe, one of the world's most advanced states had sought to extinguish even the most basic human rights and, for a while, with its Axis partners, succeeded in doing so over large parts of the globe. That fact, above all, created a determination to succeed among all who gathered in New York during the winter of 1947. A universal declaration of human rights was the clear and unambiguous goal.

Even before World War II had concluded in 1941, the momentum toward worldwide recognition of inalienable human rights had taken hold -- in the Atlantic Charter and, a few months earlier in U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech to Congress. In Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill echoed the American president's views, declaring that an allied victory would mark the "enthronement of human rights." And across the world, colonized peoples were coming to the realization that freedom and human rights were not just the preserve of Europeans and Americans, but of all men and women everywhere.

While the world was beginning to think of such fundamental concepts as freedom and justice in a new way, war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo firmly established the precedent that human rights violators should be brought to account and that there should be clear and precise mechanisms to deal with those guilty of human rights crimes, particularly on a mass scale, whether during wartime or not.

The United Nations Charter, adopted in 1945, set the goal of "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms of all without distinction as to race, sex, language, and religion." Governments played a key role in the drafting of the charter. But, not so well known, so also did nongovernmental human rights organizations -- over 1,300 of them, according to one source.

Although the U.N. Charter gave human rights a new international legal status, it did not specifically include an international bill of rights, which many advocates wanted. That task was assigned to the Commission on Human Rights.

The Contributors

A key figure in the evolution of the Universal Declaration was Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin Roosevelt, who had died in 1945. She was selected to be the first U.S. representative to the commission by her husband's successor, President Harry Truman.

By all accounts, Roosevelt had a good deal of autonomy in formulating U.S. policy toward the drafting of the document. "In effect, Mrs. Roosevelt set the policy," writes Joseph Lash in his book, Eleanor: The Years Alone. "She was a presidential appointee, a woman of world stature, and the State Department was eager to do what she wanted." Perhaps because of her reputation not only in the United States but around the world, the delegates to the commission unanimously elected her chairperson.

Eleanor Roosevelt chaired a drafting committee under the auspices of the commission that included Charles Malik of Lebanon, P.C. Chang of China, Canadian John Humphrey, director of the U.N.'s Human Rights Division, and René Cassin of France, among others.






Eleanor Roosevelt (right) confers with Charles Malik (left) and René Cassin (second from left.




As rapporteur within the commission, Malik played a key role, particularly in shaping the final draft. Malik's fellow delegates credit him with being a driving force behind the inclusion of forceful substance in the document.

Chang, one of two vice chairs on the commission, was a powerful voice for Asian nations, who were concerned that the Declaration not reflect too parochial a view of human rights. "It should incorporate the ideas of Confucius as well as Thomas Aquinas," he said. In addition, Chang is credited with resolving numerous stalemates in the negotiating process.

The U.N. Secretariat supported the work of the commission and the drafting committee principally through Humphrey. Among his many contributions was authorship of a 408-page blueprint for the Declaration. His outline proved invaluable once the drafting process began.

Cassin, the other commission vice chair, composed the first full draft of the Declaration, which contained much of the language that would later be included in the final document.

Many of the other representatives from the more than 50 governments involved also played a vital role, especially in the final drafting. But the U.N. officials, according to scholars of the Universal Declaration, with Eleanor Roosevelt at the helm, largely were responsible for making the dream of a universal declaration of human rights into a reality during the laborious days and months of meetings during 1947 and 1948. Their drive, their vision, and, in particular, their skill in reconciling the many opposing points of view were vital to the success of the effort.

A Difficult Task

But it was not an easy task. There were marked differences among member states concerning the rights of women and racial minorities, religious liberty, the point at which human life begins, the extent to which freedom of speech should be protected, the right to dissent, and the role of economic and social rights.

The most serious disagreements stemmed from the entirely different conception of the West and the Soviet bloc of such fundamental human rights principles as freedom and democracy. Roosevelt argued there was no "true individual freedom in the Soviet Union because the rights of the individual were subservient to the state."

Soviet bloc representatives countered that "the cult of individualism" led to economic exploitation and that economic rights were more important than political rights. "This declaration must uphold as a model for all humanity the figure of free men, not well-fed slaves," responded the British delegate during one famous exchange. Fundamental philosophical and ideological distinctions such as these framed the commission's debates as the drafting of the Declaration proceeded.

The delegates representing Communist countries strongly objected to the course of the commission's deliberations, sometimes delivering eight-hour speeches nonstop in an effort to steer the wording of the Declaration to their point of view. As chairperson, Roosevelt allowed them considerable latitude, but, she recalled in her autobiography, she was determined to complete the task by Christmas of 1948. "I drive hard, and when I get home I will be tired. The men on the commission will be also," she said.

In addition to disputes about the articles in the document, there were two overarching views about whether it should be explicitly backed by the force of international law. One group, composed primarily of smaller nations, believed it should be. The other group, which included the United States, argued the case for a declaration of principles to be followed by legally binding covenants at a later date. The feeling of this group was that it was difficult enough to achieve agreement on a declaration of human rights; insisting on legally binding provisions would likely delay agreement for years. This view ultimately prevailed. There were many peaks and valleys in the two-year effort, but Roosevelt and her team of true believers achieved their goal. In the early hours of December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Of 58 members represented at the session, 48 voted in favor, none voted against, eight abstained and two were absent.

The Soviet Union and its satellites constituted the majority of the abstentions; the Soviet representative said the Declaration overemphasized "18th-century rights" at the expense of economic rights. Saudi Arabia abstained because, in its opinion, the Declaration was too Western-oriented. South Africa, whose long embrace of apartheid began that same year, also abstained, arguing that the Declaration embodied too expansive a view of human rights.

Despite the abstentions, the vote in favor was overwhelming. Speaking before the General Assembly, Roosevelt stressed the epoch-making value of the Declaration:

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This Declaration may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation of the Rights of Man by the French people in 1789, the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the United States, and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries.

The Importance of the Achievement

The scope of the achievement was obvious to all. Never before in world history had the community of nations successfully identified specific rights and freedoms not just for one nation, not just for one category of persons, but for all people, everywhere, for all time.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration set the tone for a broad range of political, social and economic rights that are set forth as a common standard of achievement for all nations: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and human rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

In the wake of the most barbarous war in history, the world had finally adopted a set of principles that, it was hoped, would set humanity on a new course -- to hold all nations to account for their actions, both internally and externally.

As a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, however, the Universal Declaration had no force of law. Resolutions of the Assembly are recommendations to states, not binding obligations. But as Jack Donnelly and Rhoda Howard stress in the International Handbook of Human Rights, over the years "the Universal Declaration has come to be something more than a mere recommendation."

The Declaration inspired a number of regional human rights conventions in Europe, Latin America and Africa and, influenced the drafting of many of the constitutions of the new independent states that would emerge onto the world stage in the 1950s and 1960s, and later in the 1990s. Provisions of some 90 national constitutions drafted since 1948 can be traced to the Declaration, according to the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in New York.

The norms and precepts encompassed in the Universal Declaration also were further elaborated in a series of covenants, most notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The covenants are legally binding on the states that are signatory to them, as the architects of the Declaration had intended.

The Commission's Work Continues

Each year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the same organization chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt a half century ago, meets in Geneva to assess the compliance of states with human rights standards and to hold violators to account. Although the tools at the commission's disposal for enforcing the will of the international community have been criticized by many human rights advocates as inadequate, the importance of its ability to expose human rights violators to public scrutiny cannot be underestimated.

As Geraldine Ferraro, the U.S. representative to the commission from 1994 to 1996, has said:


"We at the commission have an obligation to speak out, a responsibility to our fellow human beings. We must be heard. Ours is the voice of the victims: the child who has no food, the boy forced to shoulder a soldier's gun, the girl who bears a rapist's child, the mother who weeps because she cannot feed her family, the father who sits in chains because he dared to speak his mind."

Thus the work of the commission and other U.N. agencies to make the Universal Declaration a reality continues. So does the work of the governments that regard its principles as sacred. So also does the work of the hundreds and thousands of nongovernmental human rights organizations around the world that take their inspiration from the document whose birth 50 years ago we celebrate this December.

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Click here for three women's remembrances of
Eleanor Roosevelt and her efforts in gaining the passage of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Issues of Democracy
USIA Electronic Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, October 1998