The UN Declaration of Human Rights

At first, after Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband Franklin died in 1945, she had no thoughts of taking on any official duties. She ‘would rather be chloroformed’, she said. But in time she softened.

Her husband’s successor, Harry S. Truman, appointed her to the US delegation to the first assembly of the new United Nations. She was the only woman on the delegation. Her male colleagues described her as strident, schoolmarmish and shrill. But she persevered; she chaired the committee that decided on, and drafted, what would be the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The drafting team had representatives from Australia, Canada, China, Chile, France, Lebanon, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Again, Roosevelt was the only woman.

The declaration would in some ways be an elaboration of the four freedoms that her husband had outlined as the principles on which the US had entered the war in 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

From the outset, the Soviet Union was suspicious, if not hostile. ‘We practically never agreed’, Roosevelt wrote to Truman in June 1949. But she understood their insistence on including economic and social rights in the declaration. ‘You cannot talk civil rights to people who are hungry’, she said, and threatened to resign if they were not included.

Roosevelt understood that rights meant nothing if they were not experienced in the casual individual routines of everyday life: ‘Where … do universal human rights begin?’ she later said. ‘In small places close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.’ She fought hard, too, for rights regarding asylum and freedom of movement; the war had left over 20 million refugees and displaced people in Europe alone.

The declaration was eventually passed at 3am on 10 December 1948. Only eight nations abstained: six members of the Soviet bloc, together with Saudi Arabia, which regarded it as anti-Islamic, and South Africa. There were no votes against.

Shortly after it passed, Roosevelt received a standing ovation from the entire assembly: hers was a new deal for humanity.