On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 217 A (III) to approve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Eleanor Roosevelt, unanimously elected in 1946 as the first chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights, played an indispensable role in drafting and building an international consensus for the concise document. Of the UN’s 58 member states in 1948, 48 voted in favor of the UDHR, none voted against, eight abstained (Soviet bloc countries, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia), and two did not vote.
UN approval of the UDHR was a landmark achievement. Never before had representatives from every major region of the world cooperated to codify a set of universal principles to serve as, according to the UDHR’s preamble, “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” That common standard stemmed from, as the UDHR preamble also stated, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
The UDHR’s point of departure links it to the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, another landmark achievement. The U.S. Declaration affirms as self-evident truths that all human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights—18th-century language for the rights inherent in all persons—and that government’s first task is to secure those of their citizens. Never before had a nation come into existence in dedication to universal moral and political principles.
Recent decades have been marked by a proliferation of human rights legal instruments and of new human rights. This trend conflicts with the UDHR’s purpose and spirit.
The UDHR does not in the first place put the protection of human rights in the hands of lawyers and politicians but rather expresses the hope that
“every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms.”
Moreover, the UDHR provides an austere enumeration of human rights. The document’s preamble and 30 articles set forth in fewer than 1800 words political and civil rights that must be honored strictly, and social and economic rights that should be realized relative to “the organization and resources of each State.” The UDHR’s austerity is meant to attain the widest possible endorsement of the most basic rights and most fundamental freedoms.
In 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He appointed Harvard Law School Professor Emerita Mary Ann Glendon as chair and charged the commission with regrounding U.S. foreign policy in America’s founding principles, the best in the nation’s constitutional traditions, and the obligations that the United States embraced in 1948 in voting to approve the UN’s adoption of the UDHR. The commission’s report showed that the protection of unalienable rights was woven into the fabric of the American constitutional order. And it argued that with America’s emergence in the 20th century as a great power facing global threats, securing American freedom at home had become inseparable from championing human rights abroad.
