As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70 this month, there is much to celebrate—and question. The Declaration helped transform the post-World War II political order, bringing outside scrutiny to states that mistreat their people and strengthening movements that ended colonialism, apartheid, and communist rule behind the Iron Curtain.
Looming over this year’s celebrations, however, is a gathering storm of discontent. Once a unifying force that brought together different cultural and political groups, human rights ideals are now too often a source of division, used to attack opponents in domestic and international disputes. The questions that the drafters of the Universal Declaration grappled with decades ago seem more urgent than ever: What happens when one fundamental right clashes with another? How can any rights be deemed universal in a world of great cultural and political diversity? What role should society, the state, and international bodies play in enforcing rights?
Good intentions, honest mistakes, power politics, and plain old opportunism have all helped set the stage for growing skepticism, and even a backlash. “All signs point to a crisis not just for human rights, but for the human rights movement,” Samuel Moyn, a law and history professor at Yale University, told the Guardian earlier this year. Indeed, Stephen Hopgood of the University of London has called this era the “endtimes of human rights.”
The crisis is evident in conflicts big and small, in far-flung countries and in the United States. Human rights advocates may praise the Universal Declaration, but few actually understand its core principles, explained in just 30 cogent articles. Instead, they invented scores of new rights and selectively used them to promote particular causes.
In Europe, for instance, circumcision is being attacked under the guise of human rights. The so-called “intactivist movement” has strengthened over the past decade, arguing that children’s bodily integrity be considered a human right while religious freedom be narrowed to essentially mean only worship and association. In 2012, a German court ruled that circumcision could be prosecuted as physical assault. In 2013, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed the “Children’s Right to Physical Integrity” resolution, based on a report declaring circumcision as “clearly a human-rights violation.” And just this year, a Progressive Party parliamentarian in Iceland introduced a bill banning non-medical circumcisions, punishable by six years in prison. The lawmaker insisted that the central issue was that “the rights of children come above the right to believe.” The bill was withdrawn this spring, after an international furor.
All these efforts feel like an assault to devout Jews and Muslims, who consider the ritual integral to their faiths. Many believe that a circumcision ban is tantamount to a ban on their religious practices. No wonder they feel that human rights are no longer universal.
Similar sentiments were echoed among Christians in the United States this year, when a Federal District Court ruled that Philadelphia could ban Catholic Social Services from foster care work because it refused to place children with same-sex couples. With the freedom of sexual expression pitted against freedom of religion, the agency was denied the right to serve at-risk children unless it sacrificed its religious beliefs, beliefs that were mainstream less than ten years ago.
Israel, meanwhile, has clearly become a victim of human rights politics run amok. The United Nations Human Rights Council, created in 2006, has focused on Israel so much that roughly half of its resolutions have targeted the country. More than one-fourth of the council’s special sessions have criticized Israel—more than have condemned Syria, which has killed hundreds of thousands of its own civilians. The U.S. government became so disgusted by the Council’s bias that it withdrew from the organization this past June.
All of this is a vast departure from what the framers of the Universal Declaration envisioned 70 years ago. The Declaration, written by a United Nations committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, aimed to help create societies where all “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.” By recognizing what it called the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” it sought to set minimum standards for how societies should operate—not dictate any particular paths for bringing those rights to life.
While the Universal Declaration clearly established a number of specific rights, including freedom from slavery, equality before the law, and freedom of religion, it purposely kept the total small. Moreover, these rights were never meant to be viewed in isolation. Instead, the document explicitly stated that every right has limitations “for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights of others.” Some provisions of the Declaration focus on the individual, others on family and community. Some focus on freedom, others on solidarity and duty. The vision of liberty and the call for social responsibility are inextricably linked.
But over the years, certain rights were promoted over others, with rights protecting individual autonomy favored over any smacking of religion or community. This approach clashed with African countries’ emphasis on restorative justice after violent conflicts, and its focus on repairing the social fabric rather than punishing offenders. It also disregarded East Asian countries’ emphasis on social cohesion over individual needs, as well as Middle Eastern countries’ desire to honor the role of religion in their cultures.
As human rights gained importance, champions of various causes began calling for new rights for everything from internet access to free employment counseling. Sadly, human rights leaders often supported such additions. So many new rights have been invented that there are now more than a thousand so-called human rights provisions in government agreements.
Meanwhile, international bodies charged with human rights responsibilities were losing respect, which fueled skepticism about the human rights idea. These bodies seemed susceptible to political influence and often out of touch, promoting top-down solutions that didn’t consider local needs. They discounted comprehensive approaches that took context into account, insisting, for example, on international justice to resolve internal conflicts in Uganda, Sudan, and Libya when a more multi-faceted approach would likely have been more effective. In many countries, they disregarded the power of incentives, like amnesty, when trying to convince rights violators to change their behavior. Often, they failed to understand the importance of building local institutions to improve countries’ futures. In Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they rushed too quickly into elections after brutal wars. So, weak institutions continued to flourish, and elites continued to corrupt the state.
International bodies also lost credibility due to mounting evidence of bias. The International Criminal Court, for instance, focused on African countries while Syria committed atrocities with little fear of prosecution.
In many cases, Western governments seemed to use human rights to advance their own interests, with the United States and European states criticizing such rivals as Russia and Iran more often than such allies as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Partly as a consequence, no doubt, cynicism about international human rights is growing in the West. Attempts to frame complicated issues such as immigration in terms of human rights just makes many practically minded people angry, making it even harder to find workable solutions to promote the common good. With human rights invoked in so many political battles, it’s almost impossible to take some so-called rights seriously.
Something similar has happened here in the United States. In those many disputes that involve conflicts of rights, a winner-take-all attitude has emerged at the expense of tolerance and compromise. Such dynamics are clear in the fight over abortion. When courts take decision-making away from the ordinary democratic processes of bargaining, persuasion, and voting, many people feel disenfranchised—and politics becomes ever more divisive.
Despite such enormous challenges, the human rights movement at home and abroad could regain its original authority, if it drew upon its roots.
Facing remarkably similar difficulties to what we face today, the Universal Declaration’s drafters established a framework for human rights that was both universal and flexible. Their realistic approach helped ensure that the Declaration would garner deep support across vastly different cultures and political ideologies already represented in the 1948 United Nations General Assembly—and around the world in the years since.
Rejecting any attempt to include every conceivable right, the drafters developed a set of basic minimum standards that no group would openly reject. They deliberately left room for states to experiment with different modes of implementation—to allow “different kinds of music” to be “played on the same keyboard,” as Jacques Maritain, French philosopher and UN supporter, once put it. Communist states would promote a greater role for government than capitalist ones. Countries with limited resources would implement social and economic rights more slowly than more affluent states. Muslim states’ priorities would vary from those of Western states. The goal: Be flexible enough to respond to different needs, but not so malleable that any basic right could be completely ignored.
Except for a few tightly drawn rights dealing with torture, slavery, presumption of innocence and the like, the framers never wanted to treat clashes of rights as winner-take-all contests. Instead, they expected conflicts to be opportunities to discover ways to protect each right as much as possible, while never subordinating any right completely to another. Practically forgotten are the Declaration’s sections which emphasize that each person’s rights depend on respect for the others’ rights, on the rule of law, and on a healthy civil society.
The framers of the Universal Declaration hoped to maximize the chance that the document’s minimum standards would penetrate every society. In that spirit, today’s human rights advocates shouldn’t declare: “Here is how you need to change to join us,” but instead ask: “What does human flourishing look like in your society or community, and how can we help you encourage it?” This shift in perspective would reduce resistance and resentment, and be more productive. But it would also require making the field far more inclusive of different viewpoints than it has now become.
Openness to diversity is especially important in today’s changing geopolitical landscape. Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries are expanding their economic and political power. China, India, Brazil, and other countries already have as least as much influence as the West in their regions—and often different priorities they want to promote.
Within the West, growing political polarization makes it more essential than ever to return to the region’s hallmarks of accepting differences and honoring dissent.
The international human rights movement would do well to recall that consensus was achieved in 1948 only because the framers settled on a small core of rights so fundamental that no nation would openly oppose them. The international human rights movement would be far more effective if it emphasized a “return to basics” and used the modest approach outlined in the original Declaration.
In the Philadelphia case, this would mean focusing on the public interest, that is, the needs of children and society. Religious groups’ rights would never be discounted. Instead, there would be substantial efforts to seek practical solutions that people with diverse outlooks could support. Legislation that allows diverse child-placement agencies to maximize opportunities for children would accomplish this and has been passed in many states. Such an approach would not end the inevitable debates over rights, but it would strengthen the legitimacy of the human rights idea.
Internationally, the back-to-basics approach could create successes similar to the end of white rule in South Africa. Apartheid leaders were never threatened with international justice. Instead, they were first sanctioned and then offered incentives to transfer power. Reconciliation and truth commissions played prominent roles; retribution was limited. The country crafted a new, inclusive national identity and developed a constitution around existing institutions, a stark contrast to efforts in Iraq and Libya that tried to replace institutions and exclude members of the previous regime.
For China and Saudi Arabia, it could be far more effective to avoid harping on governance issues and focus instead on specific human rights violations of signed agreements, such as torture, religious persecution, or locking up citizens without due process.
Ultimately, promoting human rights depends on deep support across cultural and ideological divides. This is what Eleanor Roosevelt envisioned, when she declared that documents expressing ideals “carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”