Human Rights, from Roosevelt to Obama

December 10, 2008

Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne

Exactly six decades ago today, humanity generated a historic watershed.  There is a “before and after” with respect to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   Nothing could be more persuasive and inspiring than the capacity of the world’s nations to construct, through cooperation and multilateral effort, a collective destiny that has as its goal the dream that no human being on this planet would ever be denied two inalienable elements of their lives: liberty and dignity. 

The Declaration represents a giant leap in the road of modern progress.  But as in all roads that are worth following, each step requires effort. The world faced horrors previously unimaginable during the Second World War, before its leaders were willing to consider making a serious commitment to the defense of human life, a defense which does not distinguish between race, sex, language, religion or any other type of difference.  In its universal character, lies its immeasurable historic novelty. T: he Universal Declaration of Human Rights can now be seen as a founding document for the time we would years later call Globalization.  It reminds us, day after day, that all human beings are joined together as brothers in the adventure of constructing our collective destiny on this planet. 

The watersheds of history are possible thanks to the wisdom and dedicated work of great men and women, those who in dark times can see the light beyond the urgent demands of the moment and visualize better possible worlds.  Paying homage to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bids us to remember former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in the middle of the drama of war, outlined the spirit of what would later become the Declaration.  In his speech before Congress, the sixth of January, 1941, Roosevelt listed the Four Freedoms that would guide much of my country’s outreach to the world in the years that followed: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion and culture, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  At each point of his enumeration, Roosevelt emphasized to make sure it was very clear that these freedoms should be enjoyed “everywhere in the world.”   Roosevelt ’s call was not a utopia for a far-off future, but an objective he argued could be achieved in his generation.  So it happened, with the inspired leadership of his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others, that the UN General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.  In commemoration of this historic event, the US Embassy is this week presenting in Buenos Aires Doctor Allida Black, one of the most recognized historians on the work of the former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to share a perspective on this important anniversary.

The guiding light of the inspiration embodied in Declaration presents us with challenges to the present, past and future of our collective action.  The history of my country is a paradigm of the magnitude of this work.  The engine of over two centuries of U.S. history has been the intention of realizing the ideals that the founding fathers put into words in the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791.  As the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration, these documents synthesize a collective idea of perfection.  But as beautiful as they are, words inked onto paper do not signify anything alone, without the will to put them into practice in the best way possible for our complex reality.  In my country, this effort has been an on-going and continuous process of improvement, often by trial and error.

Some moments in history, such as we are living now, renew our hope, even as they challenge us.  For example, President-elect Barack Obama put this idea in black and white in an inspiring speech that will go down in history for astutely describing the state of race relations in the United States: “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected,” he said March 18.  “…we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”   The President-elect’s own life story, as he affirmed during the campaign, would have been possible in few other places in our world.  And, it is an example inspired by the experience of earlier generations, from the struggles of slavery to the dream elevated by Martin Luther King, Jr., a dream which later would be translated into the Civil Rights Law of 1964, seen by many as the most profound civil rights legislation in the history of the United States.

Realizing the dream put forward by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a task of great magnitude, given to the new global scale in which we live.  The universal nature of the challenge is rooted in the understanding that there are more things which unite us as human beings than there are that separate us. 

Just like my country, the Republic of Argentina knows well the sacrifice, the advances and the retreats, that come with the pursuit of an ideal.  Today, exactly 25 years after the return of democracy, Argentina has become -- because of history and because of great effort -- a reference point in the field of Human Rights, whose work to create collective awareness and memory to prevent the repetition of past horrors is recognized around the world.  Memory is an indispensable requirement if the dream of human rights is to progress successfully.  Our government has made its own small contribution to this task by giving $1.4 million to the work that the EAAF is doing to identify the remains of disappeared persons during the last military dictatorship.  Many members of the US Congress voted for the funds that made this initiative possible, including then-Senator Obama.

Those who conceived and wrote the Universal Declaration imagined a world in which all nations would together address common issues for the benefit of all.  From the economy, international crime and terrorism, to poverty, trafficking in persons and climate change, our times confront challenges which are increasingly global in nature.  These challenges unite us more and more as builders of a common destiny, as visualized by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and as demonstrated possible by the story of President-elect Obama.  The notion of universal human rights was born 60 years ago as a dream: today we should work together to make the dream more a part of our reality.