Eleanor Roosevelt with a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1949. FDR Presidential Library & Museum – Photograph NPX 64-165.
This is the first of a two-part series to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second post will appear on this site tomorrow.
Jennifer Tunnicliffe
This year marks an important anniversary for the United Nations. Seventy-five years ago, on December 10, 1948, member states of the newly formed organization adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first international “human rights” instrument. In asserting that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, the UDHR reflected a new universal language of rights and freedoms. As stated in its preamble, the goal of the document was to act as a “common standard of achievement” for the promotion of and respect for the rights it outlined, and to secure their “universal and effective recognition and observance.” In its thirty articles, it sets out a list of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights that deserve protection in order to ensure the “inherent dignity of all members of the human family.”[1]
The adoption of the UDHR was a remarkable achievement and it continues to form the basis of international human rights law. According to the UN, since its proclamation seventy-five years ago, the Declaration has been translated into more than five hundred languages, has inspired more than seventy global and regional human rights treaties, and helps to guide the work of the UN today.[2]
Many histories of the UDHR highlight its “unanimous” adoption by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948, presenting it as an important moment of consensus in which members states of the UN recognized human rights as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. This emphasis on consensus, however, belies the lack of representation at the United Nations at the time for people still under colonial rule. It also ignores the fact that eight of fifty-eight states abstained from supporting the UDHR that day, and obscures the intense debates that took place over the form, wording, and substance of the instrument.[3] “Human rights” – how they were conceived, how they ought to be articulated in law, which rights should take precedence, and the degree to which they could be implemented – were deeply contested in 1948.
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This is the second of a two-part series to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. The first part appeared on this site 
