History of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Essay

The History of the Declaration

After the World War II, in April 1945, fifty countries organized a meeting to make sense of all the destruction and misery that was caused. Things did not look too bright at the time: the condition of Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; the divided Koreas; the beginning of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the U.S.; the Vietnamese unrest; let alone millions of dead soldiers and hundreds of devastated cities¹.

After the Nazi threat had been eliminated, the new menace took its place – the so-called Soviet “Communism”, which was simply Stalinism under the guise of the Marxist ideology². The menace was often talked about but not confronted directly, which could prolong (as it did) the state of the cold war even more. With all these problems in mind, delegates from fifty countries gathered in San Francisco for the United Nations Conference to think about managing the damage and building a brighter future.

It was in the best interest of everyone present to prolong the peace and stop any other potential wars from breaking out. The world was exhausted enough after the WWII, they concluded, and so their primary goal became to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”³ The Charter of the organization was enforced on October 24, 1945⁴.

The Commission submitted the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. When the Declaration was fully adopted (December 10, 1948), the UN presiding officer at that time was Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegate from the United States’ side.

The Declaration consisted of thirty articles, among which were the ban on discrimination, the ban on slavery, the ban on torture, the equality before the law, the right to public hearing, the right to freedom of movement, the right to own property, and more.

Self-Determination and Freedoms

According to the Declaration, self-determination of the Committee was reflected in a conscious attempt to abolish colonization and create conditions of “stability and well-being and peaceful and friendly relations based on respect for the principles of equal rights.”⁵

The freedoms guaranteed by the Declaration included the freedom of thought and religion⁶, the freedom of opinion and expression⁷, the freedom of assembly and association⁸, and, of course, the innate freedom and equality⁹. Article 1 proclaimed innate freedom and equality stating that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”¹⁰.

It is an inspiring statement that persecutes any disregard for human freedoms and at the same time encourages people to use their freedom wisely and reasonably so not to inflict any harm on others. It was an important point after the world’s victory over Nazism which promoted the idea of a superior master race. There, in that declaration, the Commission made sure to point out that all human beings were born free and equal, no matter what race they belonged to. For the first time in history, a unified list of all the human rights was devised. Many rights listed in the document are still used nowadays as modern laws and constitution articles. It is needless to say that the influence of the Declaration was enormous.

What the Articles of the Declaration strived to achieve most of all was the complete exclusion of any possibility of genocide or ethnic cleansing in the future. We have already seen the Holocaust, the extermination of the Chinese by the soldiers of the Japanese Empire, the Cambodian genocide, and they way millions of innocent bystanders were killed during the battle operations around the world¹¹.

The images of these horrible events were still haunting the world; needless to say they were not welcome to turn into reality again. The word itself was created when the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin combined geno- (Greek for “race”) with –cide (Latin for “killing”) in an attempt to find an appropriate name for Nazi crimes against the Jews. He described the concept as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”¹²

The objective to prevent genocide was reflected in Articles 4 and 5: the ban on slavery and the ban on torture respectively. Now the ban on slavery is included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as Article 8. On 9 December 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations designed the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

In 1984, they went further and adopted the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.¹³ The Convention was accepted by 20 American States in 1987. Nowadays the Committee against Torture still functions and holds sessions twice a year. It works with the reports presented by different States and provides wholesome conclusions and recommendations after a thorough examination of all the materials.¹⁴

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights anticipated these problems and tried to inspire cooperation and mutual aid among the world countries. Unfortunately, it did not reach its purpose, as military conflicts and mass killings continued after the war in countries like China, North Korea, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Rwanda, etc.

For example, Bosnia experienced a huge influx of emigrants from Serbia and Croatia in the 70s and the 80s¹⁵. It led to various tensions within the country. By the year 2000, the government of Bosnia was visibly split between the three ethnicities. Parties that were not satisfied with the current leader, Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnian origin, were withdrawing from the government.

Some Serbian parties split off and organized the “Serbian National Assembly.” After Izetbegovic declared Bosnian independence in 1992, Bosnian Serbs were tempted by the idea of creating their own independent state. In May 1992, they attacked a number of key Bosnian cities, including Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. The civilians were forcefully exiled from their homes and driven out of the region which commenced a full-blown ethnic cleansing. The United Nations did not want to step into the conflict, although they provided humanitarian aid to the civilians.

When we talk about genocide, we should remember that this tragedy happens for understandable and very human reasons, no matter how wild it might sound. The quest for power over one’s own freedom and the opportunity to make decisions without looking back at a leader whose policies you do not approve takes a step back and allows the simple ethnic differences steer the conflict.

In the case of Bosnia, Serbian separatists wanted to single themselves out of the country they deemed oppressing to their ethnical identification. The similar thing happened in Rwanda as the ethnic majority of Hutu killed over 800,000 people, primarily of the Tutsi minority.¹⁶ Nationalism was also the factor playing the major in the conflict and the results also included hundreds of thousands innocent civilians displaced from their homes.¹⁷ As countries and nations repeatedly fail to communicate and cooperate, we see military conflicts escalate and breed more and more victims and refugees.

The South African Apartheid and the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements

Another good example of violent civil disputes was the African continent. Let us take the topics of anti-apartheid activism, civil rights movements, and women’s movements as models. These movements were devised to help maintain the balance and fight off discrimination. Destroying apartheid in South Africa was a long and costly process that saw many obstacles including the opposition and violent efforts to subdue the movement.¹⁸ Many were taken to jail, deprived of their economic rights, separated from their families, and murdered. White women fighting against apartheid were ostracized. People like Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk tried to use co-operative approach to reach the goal of reforming their country peacefully, but, unfortunately, the bloodshed was not avoided, leaving deep marks on the metaphorical body of South Africa. After Mandela became the president in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) became the dominant party.

The civil rights movements got stronger around that time. The special organization named the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) openly investigated a lot of human rights violations (including abductions, killings, and torture) committed from 1960 to 1994. People like defense attorney Albert Louis Sachs, Arthur Chaskalson, and Rowley Israel Arenstein were working to defend the innocent (mostly Jewish and black people) from oppressive and unjust laws. On the watch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 849 cases of human rights violations were granted amnesty and 5,392 cases were refused.¹⁹ Generally, this organization made solid attempts to confront South Africa’s apartheid past and put it to rest.

As for women’s movements, the African continent saw such activists as Masediba Ngoyi (South Africa), the first woman elected to the African National Congress; Funmilayo Ransome Kuti (Nigeria), the founder of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and Women’s International Democratic Federation; Winnie Mandela (South Africa), Nelson Mandela’s wife and an activist against the white minority rule, etc.

The Results

In the end we can conclude that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights set the goal of never repeating the horrors of the two world wars ever again but was foiled by the consequences of the Second World War as the newly formed unions and republics as well as already existing countries that fell under control of either United States or Soviet Union were not able to abstain from internal disputes and eventually erupted with armed conflicts and bloodshed.

Works Cited

Burgers, J. Herman and Hans Danelius. The United Nations Convention against Torture. A Handbook on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988. Print.

Danelius, Hans. Convention Against Torture And Other Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment, n.d. Web.

Hunt, Michael H. The World Transformed, 1945 to the Present: A Documentary Reader. Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. Print.

Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2013. Print.

The United Nations And Decolonization – Declaration, n.d.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, n.d. Web.

United Nations Charter: Preamble, Purposes and Principles, 1945. 2016. Web.

Week 9 Lecture: Summary of Key Points in the Readings. What Is Genocide? 2016. Web.

Footnotes

1. Week 9 Lecture: Summary of Key Points in the Readings par. 1.
2. Hunt 14.
3. “United Nations Charter: Preamble, Purposes and Principles” par. 1.
4. Hunt 28.
5. “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” par. 2.
6. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” par. 18.
7. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” par. 19.
8. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” par. 20.
9. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” par. 1.
10. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” par. 1.
11. Week 9 Lecture: Summary of Key Points in the Readings par. 4.
12. “What is Genocide?” par. 2.
13. Danelius par. 2.
14. Burgers and Danelius 21.
15. Power 250.
16. Power 331.
17. Power 333.
18. Week 9 Lecture: Summary of Key Points in the Readings par. 2.
19. Week 9 Lecture: Summary of Key Points in the Readings par. 2.