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 Inventing Principles
The origin of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes for a fascinating
story. The future of the document may be more problematic.

Review by Austin Ruse

A few years ago a photographer covering a large UN conference took a picture of an enormous group of delegates from non-government organizations (NGOs). After the picture was taken, a woman who happens to be chairman of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women confronted the photographer and said he had violated her human rights by taking the picture.

The woman’s claim sounds like a modern superstition, a little like aboriginal fear that a photograph steals the soul of the subject. In her rather extravagant claim, the woman probably did not know the current understanding of the right to privacy, which allows for abortion on demand, actually can be traced to a nearly identical claim made by wealthy people in the late 19th century, who felt their privacy and therefore property were violated by the new invention of the camera—an assertion that was rather surprisingly supported by the newspapers of those days, including the New York Times.

More recently, an Israeli doctor testifying as an expert at a UN conference on cloning asserted that any ban on reproductive cloning would be a violation of the “right to science” and the right to found a family.

These two striking claims reveal two of the many increasingly troubling turns that the human-rights movement has taken since its modern incarnation a little over 50 years ago. First, there is the flowering of new rights. They grow like sea monkeys; just add water to any human desire and there uncoils a uniquely fashioned human right. The right to science falls into this category. Second, there is the abuse of already recognized rights. The right to found a family is recognized in existing human rights instruments, but the governments that ratified these agreements would never have agreed that their understanding included the right to a cloned human baby.

The idea of human rights is hardly new, but the notion of the sovereignty of the state to do as it pleases with its own subjects is a frequently competing idea that dies slowly, and only after a great struggle. The Magna Carta asserted the rights of nobles against the sovereign. The American Constitution and Bill of Rights asserted a set of political rights for the individual, at the same time attempting to corral the inevitable hunger for centralization. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen gave rights to all Frenchmen. However, the legal force of each of these documents stopped at the national borders, and therefore none were capable of helping the Jews in Germany, the Kulaks in the Soviet Union, or indeed anyone living outside France, England, or the US.

As the horror of the German and Japanese atrocities unfolded after their defeat in the Second World War, a steady drumbeat began for a way not only to punish the evil-doers, but also to assert the rights of all men to live free from such threats, and free to live the good life. Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University (who, in a sane world, would now serve on the US Supreme Court) has published A World Made New, an important book that tells the story of the development and implementation of that idea which became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The cast of characters
After the close of the Second World War, all the nations that had declared war on Germany and Japan by March 1, 1945 were invited to San Francisco to assist at the founding of the United Nations Organization. The post-war idea is now well understood: to set up an international system the very presence of which would prevent war. While the UN Charter was begun by the US, China (which had not yet fallen under the control of Mao Xedong), the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and 50 other nations participated in the founding of the UN. Most of those nations sought more than the collective security desired by the major powers. They sought some kind of support for the notion of human rights: the idea, still rather novel at that time, that a state’s relationship with its own people is not a “private” affair. So along with the establishment of the UN’s main bodies (the General Assembly, Security Council, International Court of Justice, Trusteeship Council, and the Economic and Social Council) the UN Charter also mentioned the idea of human rights. The meeting in San Francisco also led to the establishment of a Human Rights Commission, and it is here that the Universal Declaration was born.

This is the story not just of a document that has affected most people in the world, but of a small group of fascinating people who drafted and debated that document, sweating out each paragraph, sentence, word, and even semi-colon. There was Charles Malik, a Lebanese diplomat who studied under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. Malik wanted to spend his days philosophizing, but devoted his life instead to politics, eventually becoming President of the UN General Assembly and Prime Minister of Lebanon. There was Rene Cassin, a Jewish refugee from the French surrender, who one war-torn day knocked at the London door of Charles de Gaulle and became the General’s chief legal adviser. Cassin later won the Nobel Prize. There was the Chinese P.C. Chang, who earned a doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia University and whose heart was slowly broken as his country succumbed to Communism. Chang maddened and amused his colleagues by constantly finding ancient Confucian antecedents to nearly all Western ideas expressed in the debates. And finally there was Eleanor Roosevelt, the gangly heroine of the American Left and scourge of all conservatives.

Mary Ann Glendon is very clearly smitten with Roosevelt. Politics aside, there seems to be a great deal to be smitten about. Glendon surprises us with stories of Roosevelt’s overt religiosity: kneeling at prayer before bed, and frequently invoking the name of God. She was certainly a courageous woman, standing up in principle not just to her husband but also to Harry Truman and frequently to the rambunctious UN delegates. She may not have drafted the Universal Declaration, but, by chairing the Human Rights Commission and various drafting groups, she clearly became as responsible as any other person for shepherding the document to completion and ratification.

What is striking about this group and their other very impressive colleagues is the level of their discourse. Hearing a UN debate today is a little like listening to a conversation in a junior-high school lunchroom or to the faculty of any university’s Women’s Studies department. In those days, the debate was of a considerably higher tone. Roosevelt describes a preliminary meeting in her Washington Square apartment during which Chang and Malik debated the nature of reality, with Chang taking a Confucian approach and Malik countering with Thomism. In her private diaries Roosevelt said the conversation became “so lofty” that she “simply filled the teacups again and sat back to be entertained by the talk of these learned gentlemen.” Roosevelt was not any kind of modern feminist. Later she even argued against inclusive language.

Competing theories
The challenge for the drafters of the Universal Declaration was to find themes that would be broad enough so that universal acceptance would be forthcoming. An ad hoc group of philosophers formed by UNESCO to inform the drafting process—a group which included the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain—asserted a remarkable commonality of principles across various philosophical traditions. A British lawyer named John Humphrys, drawing from models that included the constitutions and legal declarations from Europe, the US, and Latin America, put together the crucial first draft.

What was revealed almost immediately—and what the discussion that followed attempted to resolve—was a divergence between what Glendon calls the “libertarian” Anglo-American model, which emphasizes “individual liberty and initiative more than equality and fraternity,” and European systems, which “temper rights with duties.” While the Anglo-American model tended to limit what one could expect from government, European models emphasized what citizens could expect government to provide for them, such as health care and a living wage. (Glendon has described the differences between these models in her fine earlier book, Rights Talk.)

The differences between political rights (such as the right to vote or freedom of speech) and economic rights (such as the right to health care or employment) eventually forced framers to split the document into three parts. And as the UN became subject to the growing geopolitical pressures that would eventually become known as the Cold War—as well as other severe tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere—the Universal Declaration was put forward as a non-binding political declaration. It was obvious that the US and other democracies would place greater emphasis on the right to vote, while the Soviet Union would use the notion of economic rights as grounds for criticism of market economies. These differences were so deep, in fact, that the documents originally designed to implement the ideas found in the Universal Declaration were spun off into two separate covenants: one on Civil and Political Rights and another on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; both would finally be issued in 1966, many years later than the original Declaration.

Glendon touches briefly on one of the more intriguing aspects of the drafting process: the influence wielded by Catholics, particularly those who represented Latin American nations. The Latin Americans comprised the single largest bloc of nations at the UN at that time. Moreover, they had already drafted their own Pan-American Declaration, which was used by Humphrys in preparing the first draft of the Universal Declaration. Glendon explains that this Pan-American Declaration had already “blended elements of the continental European and the Anglo-American traditions with Catholic social thought” to produce what she calls “a dignitarian, as distinct from a libertarian rights document.” She further observes that some concepts and phrases in the Universal Declaration—such as the “inherent dignity” and “worth of the human person”—bear “all the hallmarks of the dignitarian rights tradition.” These ideas derive from the social encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). It should also be pointed out that in the drafting process of the Universal Declaration the Latin American countries attempted unsuccessfully to have abortion specifically listed as a violation of human rights.

Glendon ends the book with a discussion of some of the attacks on the Universal Declaration, mostly centered on what some see as its “Western” orientation. She does not address the question of how the human-rights movement, spawned by the Universal Declaration, has spun out of control. At the UN today, radical NGOs have taken over the movement, and twisted the popular understanding of human rights into fodder for a variety of left-wing causes.

A murky future
The interpretation of human rights is not a mere theoretical matter, since a new International Criminal Court (ICC) is about to come into existence, claiming jurisdiction over every human on the planet—even those from countries, like the US, who will not be signing the international accord to establish the ICC.

Already, radical activists have been busy trying to establish the notion that restricting free access to legal abortion should be construed as a crime against humanity—an argument that could quickly be tried out on the new ICC. A parallel court already in existence, the People’s Tribunal, provides echoes of the original debate on the Universal Declaration as it tries businessmen for crimes against indigenous peoples in the Third World. While this is an NGO effort, without binding power, ICC negotiators have said that the People’s Tribunal offers a model for future steps to implement human rights.

All this activism on behalf of esoteric new “human rights” is taking place at a time when one can walk from the west coast of Africa clear across two continents to the east coast of China without ever stepping into the territory of a country that honors freedom of religion—a fundamental principle that the Universal Declaration was intended to promote.

Mary Ann Glendon’s book is an important study of the origins of the human-rights revolution. We can hope that she will sharpen her pencil soon to attack the murky future of the ideas that were outlined in the Universal Declaration.

Austin Ruse is president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which monitors the activities of the UN in New York.