Universal Declaration of Human Rights: What It Is and How It Works, Explained

Why it followed the Second World War

According to the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew directly out of the experience of the Second World War: once the fighting ended and the UN was founded, the international community pledged to never again allow atrocities like those of that conflict.

The name, though, is often confused with a different document written more than a century and a half earlier, in revolutionary France: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the 1789 French text, adopted by a different assembly and never meant to be universal.

To turn the postwar pledge into a shared text, the United Nations assigned the task to a Commission on Human Rights made up of 18 members, drawn from different political, cultural and religious backgrounds and from every region of the world. The Commission met for the first time in 1947 and finished the entire text in under two years.

Who wrote the text, and how

Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, chaired the drafting committee and is recognized by the United Nations as the driving force behind the Declaration’s adoption. The first draft of the text was written by the French jurist René Cassin. The Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik served as the committee’s rapporteur, the Chinese delegate Peng Chung Chang was vice-chairman, and the Canadian John Humphrey, director of the UN’s Human Rights Division, prepared the initial blueprint the others built on.

A declaration, not a treaty

A declaration is not a treaty: no state signs or ratifies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and no court can convict a government for violating it as such. The United Nations describes it as the widely recognized foundation of international human rights law, but on its own it does not impose legal obligations.

The rights it lists only became genuine legal obligations through two International Covenants adopted in 1966 and in force since 1976: one on civil and political rights, the other on economic, social and cultural rights. Together with the Declaration, the United Nations refers to the two Covenants as the International Bill of Human Rights.

What the 30 articles say

The text opens with a seven-clause preamble and continues with 30 numbered articles. Article 1 states that every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights. Article 3 recognizes the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 25 sets out the right to an adequate standard of living, covering food, clothing, housing and medical care, with special protection for motherhood and childhood. Article 26 recognizes the right to education, free and compulsory at least at the elementary level.

Real-world example: when a public school charges no fees for elementary grades and makes attendance compulsory, it is putting Article 26 of the Declaration into practice.

Many of these principles reappear, reworded, in national constitutions written after 1948: the Italian Constitution: Structure, Principles, and How It Works, for instance, devotes a substantial share of its articles to similar rights. The UN text’s final article, number 30, closes the Declaration by ruling out any reading of it as permission for a state, group or person to act toward destroying the very rights and freedoms it lists.

From a 1948 text to an entire treaty system

According to the United Nations, the text has been translated into more than 500 languages, making it the most translated document in the world. It has also inspired more than 80 human rights treaties and declarations, along with numerous regional conventions, domestic laws and constitutional provisions — among them, in the European Union, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, proclaimed in 2000 and legally binding since 2009, when the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force.

Even the way European institutions are organized, explained in How the European Union Works: Who Really Runs It, sits within this tradition of rights born in 1948. And more recent tensions between fundamental rights and new surveillance technologies, covered in Mass Surveillance: What It Is and How It Clashes With Human Rights, are measured against the same principles the 1948 text put into writing first.