Why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Remains Significant After 75 Years
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) celebrates its 75th Anniversary on Dec. 10. These days the United Nations is associated with so many disturbing causes, and seeming under the control of powerful governments and interest groups, that it seems strange to be celebrating one of its pronouncements. But, believe it or not, the UDHR is actually worth celebrating.
Don’t take my word for it: Listen to one of the great Catholic public thinkers of our time, professor Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law emerita at Harvard University and a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. She is a prolific writer in the fields of human rights, comparative law, and political theory — and, more importantly, is a source of erudite common sense about these subjects rather than recycling the latest jargon.
In a 1999 Notre Dame Law Review article, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UDHR, Glendon described it as “the single most important reference point for cross-cultural discussion of human freedom and dignity in the world today.” She traced the origins of the project and shared her esteem for the “vision of the men and women who, after two world wars which gave them every reason to despair about the human condition, did what they could to help make the world a better and safer place.”
The UDHR’s intellectual foundations began in 1946 when a committee of leading thinkers of the day, appointed by the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), sent a questionnaire on the theoretical bases for human rights to statesmen and scholars in every part of the world. Glendon noted that “to the Committee’s surprise, the lists of basic rights and values they received from their far-flung sources were essentially similar.”
With these lists in hand, the Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, developed a draft that they hoped would be acceptable to the then 58 member nations of the United Nations. This draft underwent several revisions in response to suggestions and criticism.
All the while, Roosevelt worked behind the scenes, hosting informal meetings among the delegates.
“I discovered that in such informal sessions we sometimes made more progress in reaching an understanding on some question before the United Nations than we had been able to achieve in the formal work of our committees,” noted Roosevelt in her autobiography.
Glendon suggested that the UDHR should be seen as “a set of principles that are related to one another and to certain over-arching ideas” rather than a “list or a bill.” She added that “it possesses an integrity which has considerable strength when the document is read as it was meant to be read, namely as a whole.”
