Glendon Mary Ann - A world made new : Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

For Claire and Giulia Giangrav

Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.

Eleanor Roosevelts nightly prayer, from Mother R., by Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt thanks are due to my agents Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley for their enthusiasm when this project was in its earliest stages; to Joy de Menil, the editor of my dreams; and to Dean Robert Clark for his unfailing support and encouragement.

Among those who provided me with assistance along the way, I am especially grateful to Habib Malik for access to his fathers private diaries and papers; to historians John Hobbins and A. W. Brian Simpson, for collegial generosity that included commenting on the manuscript and sharing their own research; and to Gregory Carr of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government, who made it possible for me to obtain material from the Soviet archives.

The manuscript benefited greatly as well from the comments, at various stages, of: Paolo G. Carozza, Douglas Cassel, Anthony DAmato, Avery Dulles, Giorgio Filibeck, Jack Goldsmith, Thomas Kohler, Donald P. Kommers, Daniel S. Lev, Edward Lev, Diarmuid Martin, Paul McNellis, Michael Novak, Samantha Power, Henry Steiner, and the students in my human rights course at Harvard Law School.

It was my good fortune to have research assistance from an extraordinary group of young men and women: Thomas Cotton, Mary Eileen Glendon, Harry Kemp, Nikita Lomagin, David Mascari, Susan Norton, Michael OShea, Reeghan Raffals, Barak Richman, and Lynne Robbins.

I also received valuable help from William Alford, director of the Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program; Ismini Anastassiou de Shali and Maria Sara Rodriguez Pinto of Santiago, Chile; Margaret H. McAleer of the Library of Congress; Victoria Schultz of the United Nations Video Section; Shirin Sinnar of the Columbia Law School Class of 2003, and Sumner Twiss of Brown University.

Finally, I am deeply appreciative of the generous support for this project provided by the John M. Olin Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

PREFACE

When the Athenian navy was poised to invade tiny Melos in 416 B.C. , the terrified islanders sent emissaries to try to reason with the masters of the sea. The Athenians scornful rebuff has echoed down the centuries: You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

History has provided plenty of support for that brutal dictum, from the enslavement and massacre of the Melians down to the present day. Yet centuries later, in the wake of atrocities beyond Greek imagining, the mightiest nations on earth bowed to the demands of smaller countries for recognition of a common standard by which the rights and wrongs of every nations behavior could be measured. The moral terrain of international relations was forever altered late one night in Paris, on December 10, 1948, when the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a single dissenting vote.

Early in 1947, with the horrors of two world wars fresh in their memories, a remarkable group of men and women gathered, at the behest of the newly formed United Nations, under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt, to draft the first international bill of rights. So far as the Great Powers of the day were concerned, the main purpose of the United Nations was to establish and maintain collective security in the years after the war. The human rights project was peripheral, launched as a concession to small countries and in response to the demands of numerous religious and humanitarian associations that the Allies live up to their war rhetoric by providing assurances that the community of nations would never again countenance such massive violations of human dignity. Britain, China, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union did not expect these assurances to interfere with their national sovereignty.

In the years that followed, to the astonishment of many, human rights would become a political factor that not even the most hard-shelled realist could ignore. The Universal Declaration would become an instrument, as well as the most prominent symbol, of changes that would amplify the voices of the weak in the corridors of power.

Together with the Nuremberg Principles of international criminal law developed by the Allies in 1946 for the trials of German and Japanese war criminals and the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights became a pillar of a new international system under which a nations treatment of its own citizens was no longer immune from outside scrutiny. The Nuremberg Principles, by sanctioning prosecutions for domestic atrocities committed in wartime, represented a determination to punish the most violent sorts of assaults on human dignity. The Genocide Convention obligated its signers to prevent and punish acts of genocide, whether committed in times of war or in peace.

Today, the Declaration is the single most important reference point for cross-national discussions of how to order our future together on our increasingly conflict-ridden and interdependent planet. But time and forgetfulness are taking their toll. Even within the international human rights movement, the Declaration has come to be treated more like a monument to be venerated from a distance than a living document to be reappropriated by each generation. Rarely, in fact, has a text been so widely praised yet so little read or understood.

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The Declaration marked a new chapter in a history that began with the great charters of humanitys first rights moment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British Bill of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 were born out of struggles to overthrow autocratic rule and to establish governments based on the consent of the governed. They proclaimed that all men were born free and equal and that the purpose of government was to protect mans natural liberties. They gave rise to the modern language of rights.

From the outset, that language branched into two dialects. One, influenced by continental European thinkers, especially Rousseau, had more room for equality and fraternity and tempered rights with duties and limits. It cast the state in a positive light as guarantor of rights and protector of the needy. Charters in this traditionthe French constitutions of the 1790s, the Prussian General Code of 1794, and the Norwegian Constitution of 1815combined political and civil rights with public obligations to provide relief for the poor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as continental European Socialist and Christian Democratic parties reacted to the harsh effects of industrialization, these paternalistic principles evolved into social and economic rights.