Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

On 9 December 1948, to the United Nations assembled at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the French jurist René Cassin (1887–1976) introduced a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document was approved the next day. "I have the honor," Cassin told the delegates, to present a document that "constitutes a step on the global level in the long battle for the rights of man.… [T]he practical con secration of the essential liberties of all men is indispensable to the establishment of a real international peace." Herein lay the political logic of this declaration, one of the pillars on which the United Nations was built. It was not a convention—and therefore not legally enforceable—but rather a statement of values, the denial of which made international peace impossible.

This document has many sources, but its Frenchness is unmistakable. The year 1948 was but four years after the liberation of France, the leadership of which had collaborated fully with the Nazis. Humiliated, compromised, eroded in a myriad of ways by the German occupation, French political culture here arose out of the ashes. In the presence of the assembled United Nations, Cassin introduced not a bill of rights, not a formal commitment or protocol, but rather a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, echoing the name of the earlier document produced during the French Revolution. There in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, within sight of the Place de la Concorde, the French republican tradition was renewed.

The links with and differences from the first Universal Declaration were clear. The 1789 document affirms in Article 1 that "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights"; the 1948 document states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Equality in dignity and rights opened the door to social and economic perspectives on the question of what was needed for liberty to be realized. Secondly, the claim that all people are endowed with reason and conscience provided a place for those who believed in a secular world alongside those who wanted a revival of religious beliefs. Thus the twentieth century went beyond the eighteenth, in a greater emphasis on economic and social rights and with a more pluralistic approach to questions of faith and enlightenment.

Other emphases in the Universal Declaration had clear contemporary echoes. All had the right to asylum from persecution; all had the right to a nationality; men and women had the right of choice in marriage and in its dissolution; all had the right to social security and the right to work. These reminders of the 1930s brought home to everyone the need for a new departure in social as well as in individual rights.

René Cassin, a French delegate to the League of Nations who had been a close aide of Charles de Gaulle in wartime London, wrote the drafts out of which this declaration emerged. But Cassin was not its sole author. Eleanor Roosevelt brought American liberalism into the equation. The Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik brought an austere commitment to Catholic humanism to these discussions. And the Canadian jurist John Humphries set the conversation in the framework of international law. But there were political considerations of another order evident in the drafting of this document.

These men and women had seen the collapse of the League of Nations after 1919. Together they found a formula that could bypass the dangerous corridors of the U.S. Senate. A nonbinding declaration was unlikely to draw American isolationists into a life-or-death struggle. Secondly, the cautious tactic of aiming at a declaration rather than a convention enabled these drafters to blunt Soviet bloc criticism of the declaration as suffering from all the faults of liberal individualism and "democratic formalism." Other delegates had little sympathy for the content or character of the declaration, but to protect their claim for U.S. aid after 1948, they were prepared to hold their peace. Islamic delegates may have gone along for this reason. This convergence of interests accounts for the consensus that formed around this document, which remains one of the United Nations' foundational texts.

See alsoCassin, René.