Seventy-five years ago today, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 

At a time when the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans, the member countries of the United Nations nonetheless came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old, having been formed in 1945 as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe. In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to set up the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit. . .

. . . The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

Heather Cox Richardson