Putting People First

The Cold War has been over for 10 years, but there is no peace and there has been no victory. As we plan to militarize the heavens, it is almost an act of restorative justice to recall that the United Nations, founded by 50 nations in San Francisco on June 25, 1945, after three months of deliberation, promised peace not merely as the absence of violent conflict but in terms of human rights. At that time, with at least 40 million dead from World War II and a planet of refugees plunged in gloom and despair, there was widespread agreement that peace was impossible unless individuals were guaranteed an end to genocide, torture, aggressive war, slavery, homelessness, poverty and personal indignity by governments in power.

When President Harry Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to the United Nations’ first General Assembly delegation, which met in London in October 1945, she called for suggestions and guidance from her friends and colleagues in the women’s movement, the peace movement, the union movement, the NAACP and other groups committed to racial justice. With their advice, she left feeling well prepared to fight for the achievement of her husband’s great legacy, as expressed in his January 1941 promise of “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear, believing that these freedoms, widely understood to be America’s war aims, would be essential to the future peace of the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt had always argued that the people of the world could expect little from governments in power, or the politicians that ran them, unless they organized--door to door, block by block, community by community. She was proud to be part of many movements that fought for economic security and greater democratization and an end to bigotry, racism and injustice.

So it is no surprise that Roosevelt considered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, voted into being by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, a Magna Carta for the world, which would serve as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Born out of the waste and carnage of World War II, that declaration remains the most far-reaching of all U.N. declarations and is the subject of Mary Ann Glendon’s book, “A World Made New.”

Vividly written and even-handed, “A World Made New” is an important, potentially galvanizing book, and in this frightful, ferocious time, marked by war and agony, it is urgent reading. Glendon’s title derives from Eleanor Roosevelt’s nightly prayer: “Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.” Sidelined almost immediately by the Cold War, all 30 articles of the declaration are now more than ever on the world’s agenda and are still the most hopeful challenge for the future.

The Universal Declaration was a triumph of diplomacy, negotiation and good will. As chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission, Roosevelt demonstrated diplomacy and steadfast vigor that were central to the creation of the Declaration and fought for the unity of “human” rights with economic and social rights, against much opposition from her State Department colleagues, who condemned them as communistic and un-American. Roosevelt dismissed that view and offered to resign, though Truman rejected her offer. “‘You cannot talk human rights,” she wrote, “to people who are hungry.”

But Eleanor Roosevelt is not the centerpiece of this compelling story. Indeed, her protracted conflicts and negotiations with the State Department and political opposition in the United States to the declaration and the two enabling covenants are hardly discussed, although declassified State Department documents relating to them have been available for several years. “A World Made New” is rather about the intellectual origins of the declaration. In 1948, the architects of the declaration were “aware that they were engaged in a race against time.” The Cold War would soon freeze over their hopes; “the Palestine question divided world opinion”; war had already “broke[n] out in Greece, Korea, and China.” For two years, however, the framers of the declaration met with one another and argued. Roosevelt considered the U.N. “a bridge upon which” she and her fellow delegates could “meet and talk.” And on that bridge, as dramatized in this book, Lebanon’s Charles Malik, existentialist philosopher, master diplomat and a chief spokesman for the Arab League, and French diplomat Rene Cassin, “an ardent supporter of the Jewish homeland, who lost twenty-nine relatives in concentration camps,” fought together for a future of dignity and respect for all humanity.

They and their allies and rivals created something monumental and enduring. Readers, especially scholars and activists, will be fascinated by the seven drafts Glendon, Learned Hand professor of law at Harvard University, includes in the appendix, and by the contributions of Carlos Romulo, an anti-colonial Philippine journalist; John P. Humphrey, Canadian director of the U.N.’s Human Rights Division; India’s Hansa Mehta, who fought vigorously for equal rights for women; Chile’s Hernan Santa Cruz, “an impassioned man of the Left”; and young embattled Soviet diplomat Alexei Pavlov. Together, they wove global principles to insist that “liberty is inseparable from its call to social responsibility.”

Rich in detail, “A World Made New” is never tedious. Its power resides in the superb use of Malik’s private diaries and papers, given to the author for her exclusive use; recently opened Soviet archives; the works of liberal Chinese philosopher, playwright, educator and diplomat Peng-chun Chang; and transcripts of Human Rights Commission meetings. Glendon’s thesis is simple and clear: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was rooted in truly universal principles. It was never meant to be “a kind of menu of rights from which one can pick and choose.” But Cold War considerations mandated changes in the scope of the declaration. Roosevelt acknowledged her government’s limited commitment to the declaration by accepting it as “a nonbinding statement of principles” to be “completed” by a subsequent covenant, which would have treaty status.

To move the virtually deadlocked declaration forward, in the autumn of 1951 the U.N. General Assembly compromised further by accepting separate covenants: one for political and civil rights; another for economic, social and cultural rights. That Cold War decision, which Roosevelt favored, “had a heavy cost.” According to Glendon, the two-covenant solution “undercut the Declaration’s message that one set of values could not long endure without the other. It suggested a retreat from the proposition that a better standard of living cannot be accomplished without larger freedom, and that freedom is threatened by dehumanizing living conditions.”

The next year, Roosevelt tendered her letter of resignation to President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower, who by accepting it effectively ended Washington’s leadership role in the effort to achieve human rights. Although more recent U.S. politics regarding the declaration are beyond the scope of “A World Made New,” readers would surely like to know that the two covenants, not completed until 1966, were ignored by the United States until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter finally signed the treaty for civil and political rights and resumed U.S. interest in human rights. In 1978, Carter sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification but failed to promote it. The Senate set it aside, where it languished until 1991, when National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft urged President George Bush to promote Senate consideration of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. On June 1, 1992, after non-controversial hearings, by “unanimous voice vote” the Senate endorsed the treaty, subject to “reservations ... and understandings” concerning the detention of illegal immigrants, the death penalty for children under 18 and prohibitions against torture, among other issues. With that “brace of reservations to ensure it would have little or no domestic effect,” President Bush ratified and confirmed the Covenant.

The book jacket for “A World Made New” proudly notes that Glendon “led the Holy See’s delegation to the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995, the first woman ever to lead a Vatican delegation.” Her delegation offended many when it attacked the very concept of gender and women’s reproductive rights and, specifically, European Union policy on the family, charging that it sought to belittle motherhood and undermine religious faith. According to The New York Times, the Vatican attack “shook the conference out of a weekend lull.” As if in agreement with Glendon and the Vatican’s position, George W. Bush’s first act as president was to ban U.S. support for any global organization that provides family planning or abortion services, even as sexual slavery, rape and AIDS rage around the world.

Though such ongoing and divisive issues are notably avoided in this book, Glendon’s insistence on the unity of the Universal Declaration represents an inspiring call for citizen action. The United States continues to ignore the social and economic covenant, and U.S. response to the declaration remains deplorable.

In May 2001, the United States was voted off the Human Rights Commission for the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt chaired it. The official U.S. response was to howl unfair, without any effort to contemplate the meaning of that vote, which many believe was a response to the United States’ undeclared war against the United Nations and the very concept of multilateral cooperation.

At a time when bitter politics have derailed the quest for human rights, the United States’ official position regarding the U.N.--especially its conventions concerning women and children--has been laggard and negative. For decades now, the United States has failed to pay its U.N. dues. In addition, the United States has failed to ratify the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the 1998 land mine treaty and led the opposition to the 1998 Rome Statute to establish the International Criminal Court.

Although President Bill Clinton finally signed the Rome Statute on December 31, 2000, sustaining the United States’ “tradition of moral leadership,” the current administration is unlikely to further that effort. It has already walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming; crashed the hard-won 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue unilateral missile expansion and Star Wars and created a leadership vacuum at the United Nations.

Armed with Glendon’s emphasis on the many women and men who made the Universal Declaration universally possible, “A World Made New” resounds with urgency: The world cannot afford another century as cruel, dangerous and deadly as the 20th century. Eleanor Roosevelt understood that it would take as much time, money and effort to fight a war for peace and human rights as it would to fight any other war.

Perhaps in this new century, we will begin to realize Roosevelt’s vision to struggle to “bring human rights to full reality in the community of the world.” In the meantime, it is a beginning, at least a sane beginning, to meet again with our neighbors, and hold the Declaration in our hands.