Eleanor Roosevelt's Statement on the Purpose of the Declaration of Human Rights Summary Record, Forty-Eighth Meeting of the Commission on Human Rights Third Session [Excerpt]

26 May 1948 [Lake Success, NY]

Speaking as the representative of the United States of America, the Chairman stated that in the opinion of her delegation the Declaration should serve two purposes:³

1. To establish basic standards which would guide the United Nations in the realization, within the meaning of the Charter, of international co-operation in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all;

2. To serve as a guide and inspiration to individuals and groups throughout the world in their efforts to promote respect for human rights.

The Declaration should not be in any sense a legislative document. The General Assembly was not a legislative body. The manner in which the United Nations could and would wish to undertake the task of promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms remained in large measure to be determined. Further, it was clear that the Declaration, as envisaged, did not create legal remedies or procedures to ensure respect for the rights and freedoms it proposed to the world; that ideal would have to be achieved by further steps taken in accordance with international and domestic law. The Declaration would have moral, not mandatory, force.

It was quite otherwise with the Covenant, which bound the parties legally. The Covenant was therefore the document which should contain measures of implementation.

The United States representative stated in conclusion that she could not better express her delegation's view of the nature and purpose of the Declaration than by quoting the words of Abraham Lincoln on the United States Declaration of Independence, and especially the following:

They (the authors of the Declaration) did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all men were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as soon as circumstances should permit.⁴

TSumex RM:UND, MWelC

1. After the December meeting in Geneva, the governments of the UN member nations reviewed the Geneva drafts of the declaration and covenant and thirteen of the states submitted comments to the HRC. When the HRC drafting committee met from May 3 to May 21, 1948, it set out to prepare a new draft of the declaration, taking the suggestions of the member states into account. Following directions from the Politburo, the new Soviet delegate, Alexei P. Pavlov, first suggested scrapping the Geneva draft and beginning all over again. After the committee rejected that proposal, he argued for changes that would emphasize the individual's duties to the state, strengthen the declaration's antidiscrimination provisions, and fight Fascism. Largely as a result of repeated requests for revisions from the delegates from Eastern Europe, the drafting committee failed to complete its review of the declaration before the full HRC reconvened on May 24, submitting a report only on the progress that it had made. When visa problems delayed the arrival of the delegates from the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the HRC meeting adjourned, at Pavlov's insistence, until May 26 when ER made the statement excerpted here (Glendon, 110-11). For ER on the work of the HRC in Geneva, see Document 291.

2. HRC, Third Session, Forty-Eighth Meeting, Summary Record, 26 May 1948 (E/CN.4/SR.48), 3-6, MWelC (RM).

3. The US State Department's Committee on International Social Policy (ISP), which reviewed the drafts of the declaration and covenant and recommended the positions the US should adopt in the HRC, provided the main ideas and much of the language in ER's statement, including the two purposes of the declaration and the quote from Lincoln.

René Cassin, who spoke immediately after ER, agreed with her interpretation of the purpose of the declaration, arguing that "it was quite clear that the Declaration should bear above all an explanatory character," that it should serve as "a guide," and "have the function of keeping the fullest possible list of human rights in everybody's mind" (Committee on International Social Policy, "Observations, Suggestions and Proposals of the United States Relating to the Draft International Declaration on Human Rights, etc.," 15 April 1948, [E/CN.4/SR.48] RG59, NARA II). For more on the ISP, see n4 Document 230.

4. Lincoln delivered these remarks in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857, when discussing the Dred Scott decision (Fornieri, 204-5; Summary Record of the Forty-Eighth Meeting of the Human Rights Commission (E/CN.4/SR.48), UNOR ECOSOC, MWelC).

Responding to Wallace

ER did not remain quiet as Wallace asked liberals to leave the Democratic Party. By March, she directly challenged the Progressive Citizens of America's (PCA) notion of "liberal" foreign policy. For example, March 21, she told delegates attending the Middle Atlantic's Unitarian Conference in Tarrytown, New York, that liberals had "a very difficult role" to play and that her experience working with the Soviets at the UN encouraged her to retool her liberal vision:

… for the liberal, who wants to believe that people are all more or less the same, that they have the same motivations, and that they respond to fair and decent treatment, it is really a very disillusioning thing to work in that fashion with the USSR because you are tempted to come to the conclusion that it isn't important to do what you feel is right. You may have been brought up to believe that if you say you are going to do something, it's important that you do it for your own self-satisfaction. But you wake up to find that you are going to get cooperation only because you are stronger than they are. Now that's a rather awful thing for a liberal to have to face in this world of today, and I think a good many people probably now feel that I am not a liberal in my attitude towards the USSR.

The Christian Register published her remarks in its June issue.¹