Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 10th of December 1948, in the great hall of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, delegates from across the world cast a historic vote. Forty-eight nations raised their hands in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not one voted against. The world had just emerged from the worst war in human memory, and humanity was trying to say something in a single document that had never quite been said before: that every person, regardless of where they were born or who they were, possessed rights that no government could take away.

  But how do you write a document like that? Who decides what those rights are? Whose values get to count as universal? The story of the UDHR is not a simple triumph. It was forged through months of argument between diplomats, theologians, lawyers, and educators who disagreed about almost everything. And once adopted, it sparked decades of debate about whether a document drafted largely in the West could truly speak for all of humanity.

  The UDHR would go on to be translated into 562 languages as of 2024, making it the most translated document in the world. It directly shaped the constitutions of at least 90 nations. It gave rise to binding international treaties, regional human rights bodies, and national courts. And yet from the very beginning, certain nations walked away from the vote without signing. Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the six communist bloc states all abstained, for reasons that reveal fault lines still visible today.

• 2. The War That Made It Necessary

  ›

  The Four Freedoms gave the Allies a moral foundation during World War II: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These were the stated war aims of the nations that called themselves the United Nations. When the United Nations Charter was drafted and ratified near the war's end, it committed all member states to promoting universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

  But as the full scale of Nazi atrocities became clear, there was a growing recognition that the Charter had not gone far enough. It spoke of human rights without defining them. It committed nations to promotion without specifying what exactly they were supposed to promote. The world had learned what happened when no such definitions existed, and the consensus was that a universal declaration was needed to fill that gap.

  In June 1946, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations created the Commission on Human Rights, a standing body tasked with preparing what was initially conceived as an International Bill of Rights. It had 18 members drawn from a range of national, religious, and political backgrounds. The Commission moved quickly, and by February 1947 it had established a special drafting committee. That committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States, whose position made her key to building support for the Declaration both in her home country and across the world.

• 3. The Drafters and Their Disagreements

  ›

  Canadian John Peters Humphrey, the newly appointed Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat, was called upon by the UN Secretary-General to serve as the Declaration's principal drafter. He is credited with devising what colleagues called the "blueprint" for the document. René Cassin of France then composed the first draft, and Cassin would later compare the Declaration's structure to the portico of a Greek temple, complete with a foundation, steps, four columns, and a pediment.

  The drafting committee was a room full of people who saw the world in genuinely different ways. P.C. Chang of the Republic of China served as Vice-Chairman. Charles Malik of Lebanon was Committee Rapporteur. Their philosophical disagreement became the intellectual engine of the entire process. Malik, a Christian theologian who cited the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, argued for the importance of individual rights grounded in a certain moral tradition. Chang, who Roosevelt described in her memoirs as "a pluralist" who held forth on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality, pressed for a document that reflected more than Western ideas alone. He urged removing all references to religion to make the text more universal, and used aspects of Confucianism to break negotiating deadlocks.

  Roosevelt recalled one exchange from the committee's first session in June 1947, in which Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism. It was a pointed remark aimed at Malik, whose attachment to Thomistic philosophy Chang was challenging. Malik later singled out Chang when thanking the members, acknowledging that Chang's ideas had influenced his own thinking during the drafting process.

  Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, an educator and judge, fought hard to include socioeconomic rights, which certain Western nations had opposed. The pro-family language in the Declaration allegedly derived from both Cassin and Malik, who drew on the Christian Democracy movement. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, a Pakistani diplomat, influenced the drafting especially on women's rights, and would later play a role in preparing the 1951 Genocide Convention.

• 4. Battles Over Words

  ›

  Hansa Mehta of India made one of the most consequential interventions during the drafting process. The "Geneva text," circulated to member states in mid-1948, contained the phrase "all men are created equal." Mehta notably argued that it should instead read "all human beings are created equal," to better reflect gender equality. The change was adopted.

  Charles Theodore Te Water of South Africa fought with equal determination in the opposite direction. He wanted the word "dignity" removed from the Declaration entirely, arguing that dignity had no universal standard and was not a right. Te Water knew, and said so, that including human dignity as a human right would expose South Africa's newly introduced apartheid system to direct criticism. Charles Malik responded by pointing out that Jan Smuts, a former Prime Minister of South Africa, had himself inserted the word dignity into the United Nations Charter in 1945. Despite Te Water's efforts, dignity remained in the Declaration.

  The second session of the Drafting Committee, held in May 1948, considered comments from an unusually broad range of bodies. Among them was the Ninth International Conference of American States, which had convened in Bogota, Colombia between March and May 1948 and had adopted the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. That document holds the distinction of being the world's first general international human rights instrument, adopted months before the UDHR itself.

  The Third Committee of the General Assembly then held 81 meetings over the course of its deliberations, debating and resolving 168 proposed amendments from member states. At its 178th meeting, on the 6th of December 1948, it adopted the Declaration with 29 votes in favour and seven abstentions.

• 5. Who Said No and Why

  ›

  When the General Assembly voted on the 10th of December 1948, the abstentions told a complicated story. South Africa's position was an attempt to protect its apartheid system, which openly violated several articles in the Declaration. Saudi Arabia's abstention centred on two specific articles: Article 18, which affirms the right to change one's religion or belief, and Article 16, on equal marriage rights.

  The six communist bloc nations offered a different explanation. They claimed the Declaration did not go far enough in condemning fascism and national-socialism. Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed with this reading. She believed their real objection was Article 13, which provided citizens the right to leave their own countries. Other observers pointed to the Declaration's so-called "negative rights" protecting civil and political freedoms from government interference, which the Soviet bloc saw as ideologically insufficient under Marxism-Leninism.

  The British delegation voted in favour but made plain its frustration. The document carried moral obligations, but no legal force. That gap would not begin to close until 1976, when the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights finally came into force. Honduras and Yemen did not vote or abstain at all.

  Among Muslim-majority countries, Saudi Arabia was the sole abstainer in 1948. Pakistan, officially an Islamic state, signed the Declaration and explicitly critiqued the Saudi position, arguing strongly in favour of including freedom of religion as a fundamental human right. In 1982, Iran's representative to the United Nations described the Declaration as a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition that Muslims could not implement without conflict with sharīʿa law. By the 30th of June 2000, member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation formally resolved to support the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, a document that uses similar universalist language but derives its authority solely from Islamic jurisprudence.

• 6. What Thirty Articles Built

  ›

  René Cassin's temple metaphor was more than a rhetorical device. Articles 1 and 2, covering dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood, form the foundation. The preamble's seven paragraphs are the steps. The main body divides into four columns. Articles 3 through 11 cover individual rights, including the right to life and the prohibition of slavery and torture. Articles 12 through 17 address the rights of individuals in civil and political society, including freedom of movement and the right to a nationality. Articles 18 through 21 protect spiritual, public, and political freedoms: freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, and association. Articles 22 through 27 establish economic, social, and cultural rights, including the right to work, health, housing, and education, with special mention of protections for those in motherhood or childhood.

  The final three articles, 28 through 30, serve as Cassin's pediment. They emphasize mutual duties among individuals and to society. Article 28 came about largely because of Charles Malik, the Lebanese representative on the drafting commission, who argued for the need to affirm the right to a social and international order in which all the other rights could actually be realised.

  The underlying structure drew on the Code Napoléon, including its model of a preamble followed by general principles. The Declaration was officially adopted as a French document, with official translations in English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. A 2022 study found that the UDHR significantly accelerated the adoption of national constitutional rights globally. As of 2014, more than two dozen countries, including Afghanistan, Portugal, Spain, Romania, and Rwanda, still directly cite the Declaration in their constitutions. The constitutions of Portugal, Romania, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Spain go further, compelling their courts to interpret constitutional norms consistently with the UDHR.

• 7. A Document Still Being Argued Over

  ›

  Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Commission that helped draft the Declaration, compared its potential influence to that of the United States Declaration of Independence. She believed that even without legal force, the right kind of declaration could reshape how societies thought about rights over time. Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik called it "an international document of the first order of importance." In a speech on the 5th of October 1995, Pope John Paul II described the Declaration as "one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time", even though the Vatican never adopted it.

  Criticism has come from multiple directions. The American Anthropological Association warned during the drafting process that the Declaration's definition of universal rights reflected a Western paradigm, and proposed three principles rooted in cultural relativism, arguing that standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive. That stance has since been largely abandoned by most anthropologists, many of whom now view universal human rights as a tool against the oppression of cultural minorities.

  Abdulaziz Sachedina, writing from within Islamic scholarship, observed that Muslims broadly agree with the Declaration's universalist premise but differ on specific contents, particularly on individual rights in the context of family and collective values. He also noted that many Christians raised similar objections to what they saw as the Declaration's secular and liberal bias.

  Kazakh religious scholars Galym Zhussipbek and Zhanar Nagayeva argued that the resistance to human rights implementation in Muslim-majority countries traces not to Islam itself but to an epistemological crisis in conservative Islamic scholarship, rooted in the long confinement of reason within strict limits. Seán MacBride, a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, advocated for adding an explicit right to refuse to kill, arguing it was implicit in Article 18 but deserved direct recognition. The Human Rights Council has since repeatedly affirmed that Article 18 does enshrine the right to conscientious objection to military service, one small indication that the Declaration's interpretation continues to evolve through use.