The woman who made human rights `universal'

The US House of Representatives, in a fit of pique which does it no credit, on Thursday agreed to make the payment of some $244 million in UN unpaid dues next year conditional on the re-election of the US to the UN's Human Rights Commission.

Editorialists and politicians have poured forth streams of righteous indignation at the loss of the seat, feeding a populist hostility to the UN which even the administration has found embarrassing.

Significantly, some of the fire has been directed at the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, whose diplomats appear to have taken a somewhat too casual attitude to the re-election prospects and the right have taken the opportunity for a few potshots at a distrusted liberal.

But there is also a degree of confidence that after this minor hiccup the US will get its seat back. Although even its friends find the US proprietorial attitude to the committee a serious pain in the neck there is a wide recognition that its absence undermines the authority of the commission's work.

Part of that proprietorial sense is inspired by memories, rekindled by the publication of a fascinating book (A World Made New - Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mary Ann Glendon, Random House) on the role of the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt as the committee's first chair and driving force in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Enormously popular, and seen by many as a role model for women, FDR's widow was a political activist and radical journalist who had no diplomatic experience when she was asked by President Truman to take on the job in 1946, but she took to it like a duck to water. Here was a vehicle into which she could pour her considerable energies following the death of her husband.

The major players on the commission were Charles Malik, Lebanese existentialist philosopher, who became a master diplomat; Peng-chun Chang, a Chinese philosopher, diplomat and playwright; Rene Cassin, the legal expert for the Free French and Nobel Prize winner; and Canadian John P. Humphrey, who played a major role in drafting the declaration. The cast also included Filipino journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Carlos Romulo; India's Hansa Mehta, a champion of equal rights for women; Alexei Pavlov, the Russian envoy impervious to the chairwoman's charms; and Chile's Herman Santa Cruz, an impassioned leftist who fought for social and economic rights. In the wings were the era's most prominent philosophers, poets, scientists, writers, statesmen and scholars from all cultures. Gandhi and H. G. Wells, to mention but two.

Eleanor Roosevelt compared the work of drafting the declaration to milestones in rights history such as the Magna Carta, France's Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the Bill of Rights in America. It was for her the most important work she ever did and the final product bore at least two crucial hallmarks of her hand: she persuaded a reluctant State Department of the necessity to accept not only traditional civil and political rights, so-called "first generation rights", but also "second generation" social rights, albeit in a very general form.

Faced with divisions about whether they should be working only towards a declaration or, more ambitiously, a legally binding covenant, she persuaded delegates to do both. It would take 19 years before two covenants, one on civil and political rights, the other on economic and social rights, would be agreed. And another 10 years before they would garner enough signatures from states to come into effect in 1976.

She was convinced that the moral authority of a non-binding document could provide a huge leg-up to the human rights movement. And so it has proved. The declaration is by itself an important standards-setting tool for campaigners the world over and inspired the more developed European system with its first functioning international court.

Her skill was in the dynamic and direction she gave to the often bitter discussions as chair of the Human Rights Commission and in the solidarity which she inspired among her colleagues when the draft then had to go from the commission to the UN's Third Committee in the autumn of 1948.

When the declaration was finally agreed the UN General Assembly gave her a standing ovation.

Mary Ann Glendon's account is an important and authoritative examination of the sources of the declaration, not, as some have tried to suggest again recently, as a Western liberal imposition, but in a genuine attempt to find common ground in the major political theories of the day for its claim to "universal" status.

As a result of the committee's labours, the Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly on the night of December 9th, 1948. It was the last train out of the station: the Cold War would soon make it almost impossible for the Western and Soviet blocs to find common ground on the question of human rights.

But it has stood the test of time. That "universality" is the declaration's greatest achievement, laying the basis for the increasing acceptance that human rights must take priority over national sovereignty.

Quite a lady.

psmyth@irish-times.ie