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BOOK REVIEW
'Mrs R' and the human rights
scripture
A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and
the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, by Mary Ann
Glendon
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
 Legal
scholars have lionized the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (UDHR) as the symbol, the representation,
the pinnacle and the scripture of the modern human
rights movement. A humongous amount of literature has
been produced in the past 54 years on the provisions,
the debates and the significance of the UDHR in
international law, but the story of its genesis is
usually mentioned only in passing. Reticence on the
historical creation of the UDHR owes partly to
unavailability of archival material from the Eastern
Bloc countries, and partly through the inability of
lawyers to escape the technical minutiae of clauses and
articles and write an account of the fascinating
diplomacy that accompanied its unveiling in 1947-48.
Mary Ann Glendon, in spite of being a professor
of law, has filled the lacuna by writing a pulsating
account with minimum legalese, an effort putting
professional historians to shame. She researched
personal correspondences of all major actors who had a
hand in the UDHR and also vetted sealed Soviet-era
records containing governmental positions and strategies
in the diplomatic roulette played out at the United
Nations. The capacity to bring alive characters of
another age with vivid flourish is rare in the legal
profession, but Glendon has succeeded beyond reproach in
narrating the journey of an extraordinary group of men
and women who rose to the challenge of a unique
historical moment.
In 1943, US president
Franklin D Roosevelt declared his vision of a post-war
peace saying, "The doctrine that the strong will
dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies - and
we reject it." His Wilsonian "four freedoms" concept
aimed at amplifying the voices of the weak in the
corridors of power laid the intellectual bedrock on
which human rights were to be promoted as a major issue
in the newly constituted UN. At the Dumbarton Oaks
conference (1944), Britain and the USSR rejected
American proposals that human rights be listed as one of
the UN's main purposes, but allowed the subject to sneak
in as a subsidiary concern falling under the rubric of
"economic and social questions". The Nuremberg
Principles of August 1945 left out the issue of
peacetime violations of human dignity, and the UN
Charter itself mentioned human rights as belonging to
everyone without enumerating or elaborating what the
rights were. Glendon terms human rights' fleeting
appearance in the UN Charter "a glimmering thread in a
web of power and interest". (p.19)
Concerned
with keeping the prestige of the Roosevelt name
associated with his administration, FDR's successor
Harry Truman named Eleanor Roosevelt US representative
to the UN. It was a momentous decision, because "Mrs R"
was an accomplished feminist, columnist and crusader
against racism in her own right and, as it turned out,
also a great "people manager". She recommended to the UN
a permanent Commission on Human Rights for drafting an
"international bill of rights", inter alia because the
greatest cause of friction among nations was "lack of
standards for human rights".
At the first
meeting of the commission at Lake Success in January
1947, debate erupted among 16 member states on how the
proposed bill of rights could be implemented. Hansa
Mehta of India and Roy Hodgson of Australia favored
establishing international forums to hear complaints
from victims of abuses, as a bill would be "meaningless
without some machinery for enforcement". (p.38) Mrs
Roosevelt, the US delegate-cum-chairperson, parried the
dilemma by practically suggesting that implementation
issues would be time-consuming and should hence be taken
up after the bill was completed. Arguments on the
antithesis between "individual" and "society" also
cropped up, foreshadowing trouble over the formulation
of economic and social rights.
A nucleus
drafting committee, comprising Mrs Roosevelt, China's P
C Chang, Lebanon's Charles Malik and the UN
secretariat's John Humphrey, was set up to meet in June
1947 to prepare a preliminary version of the bill.
Humphrey's staff studied all the world's existing
constitutions and the torrent of suggestions that poured
into the UN from member states, private organizations
and interested individuals, such as H G Wells and
Mahatma Gandhi. It was a "distillation of nearly 200
years of efforts to articulate the most basic human
values in terms of rights". (p.57) Rene Cassin, the
French delegate, revised Humphrey's draft and gave it
internal logic and coherence by introducing a preamble
and conclusion, striking a balance between the extremes
of capitalist individualism and socialist collectivism.
However, when the draft was submitted to the
full commission, the Soviet representative, Koretsky,
reported to the Kremlin that the main problem was that
the bill "might make it easier to intervene in the
internal affairs of sovereign states". (p.71)
Implementation disputes broke out in full swing, with
proposals from Third World countries to convert the bill
into a binding convention or establishing an
international tribunal to enforce compliance of the
bill, and the great powers shirking from any legal
commitment. Unable to break the logjam, Mrs Roosevelt
decided to proceed on three lines simultaneously -
working on a declaration, a legal covenant and measures
of implementation. She herself headed the declaration
subcommittee, holding that even a non-binding statement
can greatly aid in securing publicity for serious
violations.
The implementation subcommittee ran
into the doldrums soon, with the USSR railing against
"fantastic and dangerous international controls" that
infringed on a state's domestic jurisdiction. By the end
of 1947, unanimous approval of the declaration in the UN
General Assembly looked impossible as many states
apprehended its "potential for legitimating outside
interference in a country's internal affairs". (p.96)
East-West tensions over Berlin, China and Palestine were
also beginning to cast an ugly shadow over the
commission's progress. Rapporteur Charles Malik was
weighed down by urgent responsibilities representing the
Arab League in the UN, and Chang withdrew into a shell
as Mao Zedong's armies approached Beijing, threatening
his Kuomintang government.
Pavlov, the Soviet
delegate, made matters worse by proposing that the
Geneva draft of late 1947 be scrapped altogether and a
fresh one prepared. When the suggestion was voted down,
he engaged in skillful filibustering by proposing
amendments to almost every article in the draft, often
on grounds that "fascist and undemocratic elements"
should not enjoy human rights. He complained that the
"new" economic and social rights were being relegated to
second tier by Western states bent on allowing only
their imperialist civil and political rights. As the
Cold War revved up, in the guise of rancor at the UN
Human Rights Commission, the Americans and Soviets were
enacting a face-off between central planning and free
market economics. The USSR and its allies abstained from
the final vote in the commission (June 1948), though the
draft went through to the next stage for consideration
by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). At this
juncture, the declaration was a "fragile paper boat upon
the troubled seas of world politics". (p.121) More drama
was to follow.
Fortuitously, Charles Malik was
elected president of ECOSOC at the time that the
commission's draft declaration was tabled. His
diplomatic standing and persuasive skills came in handy
against a bunch of hard-nosed politicians in ECOSOC who
were not distinguished by their sympathy for human
rights. Malik's navigation sailed the draft through
without amendments to the next round of scrutiny before
the UN General Assembly's Third Committee on Social and
Humanitarian Affairs. Given the worsening state of
East-West relations and a closing window of opportunity
for international agreement, "It was now or never for
the declaration." (p.132) US secretary of state George
Marshall gave a strong endorsement to the declaration
and Mrs Roosevelt also spoke widely inside and outside
the UN to get the draft passed.
Third committee
members raised myriad objections that would bedevil the
declaration in the years to come. Saudi Arabia claimed
that articles relating to marriage and religious freedom
were based on "Western standards of family relations"
and Pavlov added that the document was disrespectful to
national sovereignty. Eastern Bloc members lambasted the
declaration as hypocritical, meaningless and patently
false. Apartheid South Africa questioned the phrasing of
Article 1, opining that "dignity" was not a "right". So
vexed were smaller countries at major power squabbling
and utilization of the third committee for slanging
matches that the Mexican delegate protested in vain how
"countries of lesser importance were worried and
helpless spectators to verbal duels". (p.151) Mrs
Roosevelt herself opposed the article on social
protection for the family since the generic article on
the right to a minimum standard of living already
covered it. In December 1948, the third committee
approved the draft for submission to the General
Assembly, with the Soviet Bloc abstaining again and
contemplating announcement of a rival draft.
In
a last ditch effort to win over the USSR, Malik
mentioned each Russian delegate who had served on the
commission by name and praised them profusely before the
General Assembly. Yet, when the speeches rolled out from
the Stalinist brigade, they all condemned the
declaration as "seriously defective". The final tally of
votes read: 48 in favor, eight abstentions and no
oppositions. Mrs Roosevelt attributed Russian obduracy
mainly to Article 13 (everyone has the right to leave
his country), which "they couldn't possibly accept" in
the light of refugee and defection games of the Cold
War. In 1949, the trial of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty
and the plight of "Russian wives" received wide
publicity in the Western media as a violation of the
UDHR behind the Iron Curtain. In turn, communist states
used sections of the declaration in their tirades
against racial discrimination and economic injustice in
America and Western Europe. The intention of the framers
had been that the declaration would be considered
holistically, but Cold War wrangling reduced it to a
document for choosing selectively in propaganda warfare.
In the early 1950s, persecution of alleged
"card-carrying communists" and atomic scientists who
were "fellow travellers" turned America into an
obstructionist force. Mrs Roosevelt personally despised
McCarthyism for using "methods of fear to control all
thought", but helplessly toed the State Department line
(and the British Foreign Office's brief) that the
unfinished covenant should be weak. Humphrey was so
annoyed with the change in someone he admired so much
that he commented bitterly, "Mrs R has become one of the
most reactionary forces." Rifts grew between the
ex-first lady and other members of the commission,
culminating in her resignation in April 1951. Malik
succeeded as the new chairman of the commission, which
by 1952 was paralyzed due to the by now full-fledged
Cold War. "Power politics was entering into and
vitiating everything." (p.207)
The two covenants
on civil and political rights, and economic, social and
cultural rights would not be finished until 1966, with
the US not ratifying the former until 1992, and never
ratifying the latter. Developing countries added a new
layer of problems to the human rights regime by
questioning the universality of the declaration in a
multicultural world. Glendon feels that "cultural
diversity has been exaggerated" by power-hungry and
despotic Third World rulers on pretexts of
neo-colonialism, cultural imperialism,
self-determination, national sovereignty and economic
development. It is often forgotten that the declaration
did not reflect one particular philosophy, political
system or people. What made it possible were "similarity
among all human beings" and the notion of a single human
experience irrespective of race, color, sex or
nationality.
The declaration inspired rights
provisions in more than 90 constitutions during its
lifetime and more than 140 countries have signed the
covenants. The declaration has retained a special place
in the minds of victims of abuse and those fighting for
their honor. As Mrs Roosevelt had envisaged, more than
the legally binding covenants, the simplicity and
syncretism of the "morally binding" declaration have
been appealed to whenever the question of human rights
has arisen. Glendon concludes with the apprehension that
for Mrs Roosevelt and her dedicated band, freedom and
economic security were two sides of the same coin, a
notion that is being crushed today by sundering the
declaration into two halves and separating rights to
life, liberty and speech from global economic injustice.
People not yet born will pass judgment one day
on whether we enhanced or squandered the inheritance
handed down to us by Mrs Roosevelt, Malik, Chang, Cassin
and Humphrey. The Cold War was a lost age as far as
human rights were concerned. It is now up to the
post-Cold War generation to pick up the pieces and
remake the world where all humans are free and equal in
principle and fact.
A World Made New. Eleanor
Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon, Random House, 2001.
ISBN: 0-375-76046-6. Price: US$15.95, 333 pages.
(�2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact [email protected] for
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