“The future must see the expansion of human rights across the world,” Eleanor Roosevelt told a crowd in September 1948 at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “People who have glimpsed freedom will never be satisfied until they have obtained it for themselves… People who continue to be denied the respect to which they are entitled as human beings will not accept not forever such a denial. “
Eleanor Roosevelt speaking at the Conference for Human Rights at La Sorbonne, 1948.
Roosevelt was there to talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document she had overseen drafting at the new United Nations. The UN adopted the document that year on December 10, a date now commemorated as Human Rights Day.
The rights enumerated in the declaration were controversial among UN member countries, and remain so today. It proclaims, among other rights, that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living sufficient for his health and well-being and that of his family, including food, clothing, shelter, medical care and services. social requirements. ” The former First Lady fought to make the declaration complete and later wrote that she considered it “my most important job” during her years at the UN.
Prevent war by supporting human rights
The 51 countries that founded the UN did so in October 1945, just months after the end of World War II. Following two world wars and the first nuclear bombings, and in the midst of a global refugee crisis, many feared that a more destructive World War III was imminent. The United Nations was founded at a time when people like Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to avert such a catastrophe and address human rights as a way to prevent war.
President Harry Truman appointed Roosevelt to the US delegation to the UN at the end of 1945. By that time, she was well known in the US and abroad. As First Lady during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration from 1933 to 1945, she championed poverty reduction, access to education, and civil rights, and went to the front lines of Europe and the Pacific during World War II. In April 1946, she became president of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and took charge of drafting a declaration of human rights for the world.
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Rooselvelt’s ideas about human rights and the need to work for world peace were strongly influenced by his experiences during the two world wars. On the home front, she served food for soldiers in World War I and “took the lead in getting the federal government to address sailors shocked by shells that were trapped in jackets. straight to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, ”says Allida Black, scholar at AVU’s Miller Center for Public Affairs and senior editor of GWU’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project.
She saw with her own eyes the death and devastation in Europe caused by the First and Second World Wars and continued to witness it during her appointment to the UN. In a column published in February 1946, she wrote about her visit to the Zeilsheim IDP camp in Germany. After meeting Jews who had survived the Holocaust, she reflected, “When will our consciences become so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
Develop a declaration for all
Eleanor Roosevelt, humanitarian, widow of Franklin D. Roosevelt and representative to the United Nations, listens on headphones during a conference at the temporary United Nations headquarters in Lake Success, New York, 1946.
Keystone / Getty Images
Creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not an easy task, as countries like the United States and the Soviet Union could not agree on what human rights were. man. To work there, you had to convince people who disliked and disagreed with her, like Republican John Foster Dulles, an American delegate to the United Nations General Assembly who had protested against the appointment. of the Democratic First Lady. Roosevelt appealed to his Catholicism for support for including economic and social rights – which many American conservatives have denigrated as “communists” – in the statement. And it worked.
“So the more belligerent Republicans are teaming up with Eleanor Roosevelt to go to Harry Truman and the Secretary of State to say, ‘We have to have economic and social rights in this document; people have to have access to food, they have to have access to shelter, they have to have access to education, ”says Black. “Imagine that.”
Hansa Mehta, a UN delegate from the newly independent country of India and the only other woman on the Commission on Human Rights, also played an important role in crafting the declaration. It was she who suggested changing the original language of the statement in the first article from “All men are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal,” says Blanche Wiesen Cook, professor of History and Women’s Studies at CUNY and author of a three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Although the declaration was not a binding and enforceable treaty, it has served as a model for legislation in many countries. After its adoption, Roosevelt continued to promote and speak about the declaration and the importance of human rights.
“She was very proud of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and believed it would quickly be followed by binding covenants,” says Cook. “But she died in 1962 and the covenants weren’t even ready then, and the United States didn’t sign the Civil and Political Rights Pact until George Herbert Walker Bush got it.” ratified when the Soviet Union collapsed. “
The United States has yet to ratify the treaty pact on economic and social rights.
