Eleanor Roosevelt’s Triumph—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris on December 10, 1048 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today is International Human Rights Day which commemorates the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.  The vote was 48 ayes, 0 nays and 8 abstentions.  The abstentions came from the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian and Belorussian S.S.R.s, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.

The Declaration was an outgrowth of the bitter lessons of World War II and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms which had become the foundation and promise of the alliance against the Axis Powers known at the United Nations.  As the war drew to a close, the United Nations was chartered as new international body to replace the failed League of Nations.  From the beginning codifying international standards for rights was a priority.

Canadian legal scholar John Peters Humphrey, Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat, was selected as the principle writer.  He worked closely with a commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, a tireless advocate for a strong declaration.  Members of the commission were selected from a representative cross section of UN members—Australia, Belgium, Byelorussia, Chile, China, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Lebanon, Panama, Philippine, United Kingdom, U.SA, Soviet Union, Uruguay and Yugoslavia.   

Eleanor Roosevelt admires her handiwork.

Humphrey produced a draft which became the working document with details to be haggled over.  Besides Mrs. Roosevelt,   Jacques Maritain , René Cassin and Stéphane Hessel all of France; and Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian;  and China’s P. C. Chang played leading roles in working over Humphrey’s texts.

There were numerous struggles in the commission, particularly over objections of Islamic countries over the rights of women, marriage, and the freedom to change religions.  The Soviet Union and its allies and vassal states fought furiously against enshrining individual liberties “at the expense of common necessity.” And conservative Western governments were just as adamantly opposed to including social, economic, and cultural rights.  Mrs. Roosevelt played a key role in patching over differences and coming to a conclusion.

None-the-less, after months of work within the commission the General Assembly debated almost every point and held more than 1,400 votes on virtually every word and clause in the document before it was ready for a final vote of approval.

The Universal Declaration drew heavily on the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.  In turn this was reflected in the First Principle of the Unitarian Universalsit Association affirming the "Inherent worth and dignity of every person.

 

In 1966 the UN General Assembly adopted two detailed additional Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and on Civil and Political Rights, which were ratified by sufficient numbers of member states by 1975 to become international law.  The Universal Declaration of Human rights along with the two covenants are now considered the International Bill of Rights.

The documents, taken together, are important in and of themselves.  But in practice member nations have seldom been willing to challenge the national sovereignty of member states known to be violating the terms of the agreements and perpetrating even the grossest of Human Rights abuses. 

In the midst of a global economic crisis and regional ethnic and religious turmoil, Human Rights are under constant attack.  And the United States, which once proudly proclaimed them, now prefers to cite American exceptionalism for permission to observe them in the breach.  That was the position of the George W. Bush administration for launching the so-called war on terror including acts of kidnapping, summary executions, the use of torture, and indefinite detention without trial.  Although President Barack Obama backed away from some of the excess like the use of torture, he continued and escalated a policy “destroying terrorism anywhere” leading to undeclared war in dozens of countries, targeted assassinations including American citizens, and unrestricted drone warfare resulting in mass civilian casualties.  It has been the shame of his Presidency.

Now comes Donald Trump, an open admirer of “strong leaders” with disastrous human rights records like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has proposed ethnically targeting Muslims and immigrants, revoking citizenship of some protestors—flag burners to start with, and waxed nostalgic for the use of harsh tactics against demonstrators.  His unleashed supporters feel free to harass, intimidate, and threaten anyone who irks him and have physically assaulted Muslims, women, perceived immigrants, LBGT individuals, the homeless, the disabled, liberals and their families.  He has appointed known White nationalist to the highest levels of his administration.  His former campaign manager just announced that “there must be consequences” for those who publicly oppose her boss.  The list goes on and on.  The news gets worse daily.

Human rights are under assault around the world and especially threatened by the rise of Trumpism in the U.S.  The United Nations has never lived up to its obligations to protect individual and groups under attack in member nations.  Clearly the United States government in the hands of the incoming regime not only will offer no protection but will become the oppressor.  Only the people themselves can protect their rights.  Stand up!  Stand united! Join the Resistance!

The fact is that Trump may not only make the Universal Declaration a dead letter, he seems willing to throw the Constitution on the fire as well.

May the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt haunt the dreams anyone who collaborates in the effort.  The rest of us need to be ready for active resistance.

The Four Freedoms—Franklin Roosevelt’s Endangered Idealism

FDR proclaimed the Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union Address

Technically it was a State of the Union Address, his eighth since taking office in 1933.  Nobody else ever got to deliver that many such messages to Congress either as an in person speech or as a written document to be read by some droning clerk as had been the custom through most of the nation’s history.  And as it turned out, no one will ever get a chance to break that record.  But that’s another story.

History remembers Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s remarks on January 6, 1941 for one paragraph in a long recitation of the nation’s challenges and his administration’s accomplishments and proposals for the future:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

And so the famous Four Freedoms were announced to the world as an American vision and purpose.  The first two, Freedom of Speech and Expression, and Freedom of Religion were unremarkable restatements of ideals embraced by the Founding Fathers and Constitution.  The second two were kind of revolutionary and looked on as such by alarmed domestic conservatives and belligerent powers and were cheered by progressives and starry-eyed idealists of various stripes.

The world was at war that January and Roosevelt knew that sooner or later that the United States would be drawn into the war.  And he knew clearly on which side—with the beleaguered British and their mostly defeated allies against Nazi Germany and Axis Powers.  He had been doing everything possible he could to aid the British skating to the brink of American neutrality  with Lend Lease and other aid.  But he faced an American public still firmly in the grips of isolationism and powerful domestic political operations and mass movements like America First fanning opposition to any American intervention.

The Four Freedoms provided an ideological platform to rally support for war preparations and the inevitable.

Norman Rockwelll's famous paintings were used to spur War Bond Sales and rally patriotism in 1943.

He would confer with Winston Churchill in the Mid-Atlantic in August where the two would proclaim the Atlantic Charter which would be close to an open announcement of alliance and a declaration of eventual war aims that would incorporate the elements of the Four Freedoms, along with renouncing the aim of territorial gain or post-war vengeance on the losing nations. 

When Japanese bombs swept away any political opposition to entering the war, the Allies wanted to provide the world wide conflagration with a higher and grander purpose than simply defenses against aggressors.  Roosevelt wanted to transform a typical war time military alliance of convenience, which had grown to include the Soviet Union, into an enduring union of nations grounded in noble principles. The President had obviously absorbed the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, who he had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.     

The United Nations was proclaimed in January 1942 just a year after the Four Freedoms speech. Largely at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, the declaration of a united world embodied the freedoms.

In the post war world Eleanor would work to embody them in the founding documents of the post war UN and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After the War things like this early United Nations poster confirmed the right wing's worst fears about the intent of the the Four Freedoms.

The American right wing has always hated Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms, and the international world community that they envisioned.  They recognized that Freedom from Want would inevitably undermine unfettered Capitalism based on ruthlessly competing interests competing for advantage and market share by keeping wages down and maintaining a large reservoir of the poor prepared to go to war with their peers over table scraps.   Freedom from Fear was seen as a cover for the United Nations—a surrender of American sovereignty and a malevolent force for one world government. 

But in the post-war years there was little they could do but rage against it.  Even at the very height of McCarthyism and the second Red Scare, the public overwhelming embraced the ideas of the Four Freedoms, which were celebrated by paintings by the all-American Norman Rockwell.  Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower enthusiastically endorsed them.  They were at the heart of a great American consensus that survived the Vietnam War only to shatter to pieces during the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Triumphant neo-conservatives renounced idealism and put naked American “self-interest” enforced by overwhelming military might at the center of foreign policy.   The aspiration of other nations and peoples mean nothing.  Even pretending otherwise was cast aside on the presumption that fear—shock and awe—would carry the day.

The apparent betrayal of the Four Freedoms has become fodder for the Left in parodies like this.

Even as the disastrous consequences of that policy became apparent, the inheritors of liberalism, the Obama administration, have been tied up in real politic cynicism and while sometimes trying to dress things up with references to past idealism,  instead in Drone attacks,  and suspension of civil liberties and human rights abroad and even at home.

Were the Four Freedoms ever more than a lofty rhetorical device?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But the world seemed to be a better place when we at least tried to live up to them.