Thoughts about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Last night my book club met to discuss A world made new: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human by Mary Ann Glendon. I thought it was a good discussion, and I want to share a couple of the major topics.

For most of us it is hard to understand the minds of the people who created the Universal Declaration and the United Nations system in which it found its expression. These were people who had lived through the first and second World Wars, often in positions of authority in both, as well as the Great Depresssion. They were shocked by the evidence acruing from the Holocaust and other attrocities, and the atom bomb had suggested that a third world war would be still more horrible than the second. These were people who thought that an international system might be created that would help preserve the peace and that would avoid the problems that killed the League of Nations.

The people negotiating the Universal Declaration were not all liberals, in the sense of political proponents of protection of human rights. Indeed some were there to make propaganda points, some to stall and delay and perhaps kill the effort, and only some to negotiate a strong Declaration. So why did they keep negotiating?

In our last election the division became very clear, with the Republicans much more skeptical about negotiating with the world in the UN setting and the Democrats much more willing to do so. Indeed, the Obama administration has rejoined the UN Human Rights Council and the Bush administration refused to seek a place on it. One answer is that the United States Delegation was rather successful in negotiating a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so the decision to stick to the negotiations looks pretty good in retrospect.

It does seem that there was a perfect conjunction of positive factors. There were many issues in play in the creation of the new international system and the nations were willing to give up on some issues to get their way on others. The Nurenberg Declaration had established international standards for human rights at least in the case of war. Moreover, the committee drafting the Universal Declaration was exceptionally qualified, with key people appointed for their expertise rather than their political committment to an ideological position or as aparatcheks of government bureaucracies.

The performance of Eleanor Roosevelt deserves special note. She was probably the most famous person in the world, with a strong record of promotion of human rights in the United States. She was very good at a human level with the individual members of the committee, and selflessly let others, usually more intellectually qualified, do the heavy lifting of drafting the Declaration. On the other hand, she skillfully walked the fine between that which would be too extreme to be accepted by conservatives in the United States, and that which would be too modest to be accepted by liberals.

So how important was the Universal Declaration. It was a declaration, in the sense of a simple statement of the hopes of the member nations, and six decades later the Conventions and Covenants that put teeth into the support for international protection of human rights are still under negotiation. Moreover, what does it really mean to say that people have a right to a job whcn no government is able to assure meaningful employment for all of its people all of the time? What does it mean to say that everyone has a right to basic education when six decades later there are 75 million school age kids who can't go to school and three-quarters of a billion illiterate adults?

It seems that one effect of the Universal Declaration was that there have been nine major and many more minor Conventions negotiated protecting human rights. Moreover, many national constitutions have included statements guaranteeing protection of human rights. Recognizing how unprecedented the Univeral Declaration was, one may question whether it influenced member states of the UN to enshrine bills of rights in their constitutions and legislation.

Moreover, the simply declaration of values may help to move toward those values even when people fail to live up to them. There have been a couple of generations who have grown up in a world in which the nations had declared there to be univeral human rights and have negotiated a series of Conventions to provide some guarantees for those rights. One may assume that those generations are more liberal than they might otherwise be.

Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous posting, there is pretty good evidence that Constitutional liberalism is a strong contributor to success in political and economic progress.