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Human Rights Quarterly 24.1 (2002) 287-290



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A World Made New:
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Origins, Drafting and Intent


A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (New York: Random House, 2001)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent, by Johannes Morsink (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

Both these studies belong on scholars' shelves, albeit for different reasons. While Glendon provides a splendid overview of the reasons for the impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from early in World War II to the present, Morsink delves into the complex reality of a little more than two years of intense negotiation over text. A World Made New and The Universal Declaration complement each other. One is extensive, the other intensive. Taken together, these books provide a far richer picture about the UDHR than have the scores of articles, chapters and even books written about it earlier.

The drafters of the document faced a double challenge. First was preparing legally binding agreement--to which the United States and the USSR were adamantly opposed. Both superpowers strongly preferred to safeguard national sovereignty (as well as the UK and France, still possessors of large colonial empires) and wanted little more than a declaration of principles. (Besides, both the latter could, from 1951 on, find a basis for international protection of human rights through the European Convention.) Secondly, means of enforcement had to be devised. Underlying both the legal agreement and the means of enforcement was a philosophical framework that would not unduly privilege any particular tradition. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided this third element. Though derided as a collection of contradictory platitudes, the UDHR has proven to have remarkable staying ability. Standing apart from the machinery of enforcement, it achieved "an independent moral status in world affairs and law." 1 The two International Covenants and the follow-on human rights treaties were "less important to the cause of human rights than were the principles announced in the Declaration." 2

The two authors see the UDHR as truly global in scope. It was initially drafted by persons drawn from or trained in the "Western tradition," both note, thereby opening the charge of cultural relativism. Criticisms of the Declaration "will probably grow in intensity and frequency because the universalist agenda of liberalism is closely aligned with that of universal human rights. . . ." 3 He pointedly reminds us that the Declaration was adopted when the Cold War [End Page 287] "was at its most intense and that the moment for such a universal moral code was not a propitious one." 4 Instead, "[t]he human rights they proclaimed were to them the moral cement that binds together the increasingly pluralistic societies of the modern world. . . ." 5 He strongly rejects the notion of insularity, however, concentrating instead on education.

Glendon is equally pointed about the global reach of the Declaration. It is the similarity among persons that makes universal human rights possible. 6 The "extraordinary success" of the UDHR is not what demands explanation, as it has become a "secular Bible." 7 Each state had considerable input fall 1948, when the Third Committee of the General Assembly went through the Commission on Human Rights' draft seriatim. Drawing the least discussion, in fact, were the first dozen or so articles, which embody the tenets of Western liberal civil and political rights which existed in the constitutions of practically all countries. The strong support given in committee stages paved the way for the historic adoption without dissent of the UDHR as a whole 10 December 1948.

Even earlier, however, there was extensive input in drafting of the Declaration's thirty articles: 400 pages of UN documentation prior to the first working draft prepared by the indefatigable John Humphrey, a UNESCO-sponsored symposium of philosophers (erudite but not particularly helpful save in affirming diversity of traditions...

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