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The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) codified human rights with
unprecedented sweep—as universal and inherent—and the date it was adopted
by the UN General Assembly, December 10, 1948, is the widely acknowledged
birthday for the contemporary human rights movement. Not only has the
UDHR inspired and guided oppressed individuals and groups, its language
has been incorporated into the constitutions of many nations in the last
55 years, and through slow accretion of acceptance its principles have
achieved status as customary international law.
But until the universality of human rights is philosophically and legally
self-evident to all, books like Johannes Morsink’s The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights will remain necessary. Morsink, who
teaches political philosophy at Drew University, revisits the charge that
the UDHR is an ethnocentric document which promotes western values under
the banner of universal rights.
What becomes clear from his examination of the composition process, the
influences of the drafters and the points of conflict as the UDHR evolved
through seven drafts is the remarkable amount of consensus on rights.
Even the nations that abstained—six communist nations, South Africa and
Saudi Arabia—played an active role in the early and final drafts and did
so out of self-interest (like apartheid South Africa’s objection to the
right to free movement in Article 13), not out of rejection of the idea of
human rights itself. Morsink’s scrupulously detailed study draws on
primary sources that the vast majority of us will never see, reason enough
that the book be added to libraries and reading lists.
Under the
auspices of the newly minted United Nations charter, a Commission on Human
Rights was formed in 1946, and over a two-year span delegates from a
variety of cultural, religious, economic and political systems met to
hammer out a language that would mark a millennial moment in the
development of human rights ideology. The composition-by-committee
reflected the shared revulsion against the atrocities of the Holocaust,
the aspirations of religious tradition, Enlightenment thought, Latin
American socialism and the women’s movement as well as the language of
existing constitutions, adding “a great deal to the authority and
universality of the document.”
In addition to
being an essential reference work in the discussion about the universality
of human rights, Morsink’s study is helpful to teachers who want to
cherry-pick material for any number of topical units—on individual
articles of the UDHR, women’s rights, the socialist influence in
work-related rights, to mention a few.
I draw from
the book’s second chapter, “World War II as Catalyst,” in teaching how the
Holocaust was a constant reference point as delegates hammered out the
language for “a common standard of achievement” which would be a bulwark
against tyranny. Under the Nazi regime the rule of law, which is central
to a healthy rights climate, was systematically perverted, for Hitler
implemented legal means to create a totalitarian society unaccountable to
individual rights. Moral indignation brims in the Declaration’s
preamble. Article by article responds to the nazification of the legal
system with provisions for the right to be free of servitude and torture
(Articles 4 and 5), rights to judicial fairness (Articles 6-10), to
freedom of movement (Article 13), asylum (Article 14) and nationality
(Article 15), among others.
The fact that the UDHR was not accompanied by a covenant (a more complex
and binding document) on enforceability was seen by some observers as a
terrible failure and evidence of the Declaration’s fatal flaw. But the
world was not ready for that.
Remaining separate from the means of its own implementation, the UDHR
would still achieve lasting power. Morsink writes, “It turns out that the
adoption in 1948 of a Declaration that did not itself include any
machinery for its own implementation has been a blessing in disguise.
Because it floats above all local and regional contingencies and is a
statement of more or less abstract moral rights and principles, the
Declaration served as a midwife in the birth of all these other more
concrete and detailed international instruments.”
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