NEWS FEATURE: Remembering Eleanor Roosevelt _ `mother’ of U.N. human rights declaration

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Eleanor Roosevelt is remembered for many humanitarian contributions to the nation and to the world, but she is being remembered this year as the”mother”of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a touchstone for faith groups as they are increasingly involved in international human rights issues. Pope […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Eleanor Roosevelt is remembered for many humanitarian contributions to the nation and to the world, but she is being remembered this year as the”mother”of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a touchstone for faith groups as they are increasingly involved in international human rights issues.

Pope John XXIII signaled the churches increasing awareness of the declaration in the early 1960s when he described it as”an act of highest importance … for the world community.”It has been used by denomination’s across the faith spectrum to ground their own positions on human rights.


The U.N. is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the declaration, the first intergovernmental bill of rights to identify and protect the dignity and rights of each person on the planet, with a year of events designed to celebrate its achievements and raise awareness of trouble spots around the world.

The massive committee coordinating the celebration includes many religious groups, including the American Jewish Committee, Church Women United, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Maryknoll Mission Association of the Faithful, the National Council of Churches and the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is.”The UDHR is a fundamental reference point for the ELCA with regard to human rights,”said Dennis Frado, director of the Lutheran Office for World Community in New York.”Our 1995 social statement entitled, `For Peace in God’s World,’ quotes the Preamble to the UDHR concerning the inherent dignity of all members of the human family and says these words `are consistent with our understanding of humans created in God’s image.'” Religious groups have quoted the document many times in the last half century, typically under two sets of circumstances:

_ When intervening for persons who are arbitrarily detained, tortured or victims of genocide and war crimes.

_ When addressing economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to food, housing, work and education _ not always recognized as rights.”During the civil war in El Salvador, the ELCA wrote to U.S. and Salvadoran authorities about specific human rights abuses,”Frado said of his denomination’s use of the U.N. document.”We have written to a variety of other governments about disappearances and detentions. In these communications we often refer to the declaration.” While historians and sociologists have described the impact the document has had around the world, less broadly known is Roosevelt’s role and how in 1947, she, at times single-handedly, moved it forward in the treacherous waters of international negotiations.

In early December 1945, President Truman asked Roosevelt to serve as a U.S. delegate for the first meeting of the United Nations Assembly in London.

While serving, she dealt with some who wanted to transform the United Nations into a world government. She also sat through so many impassioned, mind-numbing speeches on the rules of procedure alone she actually considered taking her knitting along so she could feel like something worthwhile was happening.

She was assigned to the committee that addressed humanitarian, social and cultural matters and whose work was expected to be relatively noncontroversial. However, this committee actually became the stage for a high drama regarding refugees, pitting the U.S.’s political philosophy against that of the Soviet Union.”A new type of political refugee is appearing … people who have been against (their) present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed,”she wrote in her diary. At the time of the debate in early 1947, more than 1 million refugees _ many from from communist countries and uprooted by war _ were living in makeshift camps.


Soviet delegates, however, argued the refugee question had no place in international conversation because, they said, there were only two kinds of refugees: those who were willing to be repatriated and those who were traitors.

In a final, tension-filled showdown before the entire assembly, Roosevelt, debating Andrei Vishinsky, head of the Russian delegation, spoke extemporaneously, defending the rights of the world’s citizens to hear and to speak both good and bad about governments and the underlying philosophy putting the rights of humans first in any political debate.

The United Nations’ most important duty, Roosevelt said, was to focus on that which meant greater freedom for humans, not governments. The Soviet amendments, which would have gutted the statement on refugees, were soundly defeated.

Following a second extemporaneous debate with the Soviets over basic human rights issues, Roosevelt was asked to chair the U.N.’s”nuclear”commission on human rights.

This was the committee that would produce the 18-nation Human Rights Commission, which, in turn, produced the UDHR, described by its supporters as”a Magna Carta for humankind.

Even after the UDHR was drafted and adopted, Roosevelt maintained her concern for the issue, expressing her common-sense approach to spirituality and the human condition.


In a syndicated column in 1954, Roosevelt recalled a church sermon on the admonition to love one another.”In thinking it over afterwards, it seemed to me that in the world today it is sometime rather difficult to follow the spirit and the teachings of Christ. … Some people I know feel that the strain today _ the possibility of atomic war _ is unbearable. But that, I think, is really a challenge to those of us who believe that God will not destroy willingly.”Only if we, through our blindness, fail to carry out His will as we have in the past, and perhaps will again, will we (not God) achieve destruction. That knowledge should make us work harder than we have ever worked to build a better world.”

DEA END RNS

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