美国国家公共电台 NPR Boundlessly Idealistic, Universal Declaration Of Human Rights Is Still Resisted

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Around the world today is Human Rights Day. It was on this December day in 1948 that member states of the United Nations approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That declaration listed what people would be entitled to in a world of genuine peace and justice. But the document lacked the force of law, and on its 70th anniversary, it's not yet universally accepted. NPR's Tom Gjelten reports.

TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE 1: Having just experienced two world wars, countries large and small wanted to believe that barbarism from then on could be made unthinkable. So they created the United Nations with a charter that reaffirmed faith in fundamental human rights. But the charter did not say what those rights were exactly, so a U.N. commission set out to make a list. For nearly two years, delegates debated. Finally, in December of 1948, the declaration was ready.

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CHARLES MALIK: Thus we state that you and I are born free and equal.

GJELTEN: Commission Secretary Charles Malik of Lebanon went through the rights one by one at a U.N. General Assembly meeting in Paris.

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MALIK: We declare the right of asylum 2 and the right of nationality.

GJELTEN: Thirty rights in all defining an ideal humankind had never achieved...

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MALIK: The right to social security, to a decent standard of living.

GJELTEN: ...By calling to end discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin, the declaration foreshadowed struggles yet to come. An article calling for equal pay for equal work was just one where the United States itself still falls short. The commission chair was Eleanor Roosevelt. In her presentation, she acknowledged the document could not be enforced but could be used to define principles.

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ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: And to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.

GJELTEN: That was the controversial part, the idea that these rights should apply across cultures and religious traditions. Saudi Arabia was uncomfortable with an article endorsing 3 one's right to change religions, a move some Muslim theologians see as unacceptable under Islam. To support the U.N. version of human rights in some Muslim countries, for many years, was to ask for trouble.

ASMA UDDIN: A common discourse 4 I heard was that I was somehow, you know, like, an agent for Western colonialism I guess.

GJELTEN: Asma Uddin, herself a Muslim, advocates for human rights and religious freedom in places like Pakistan where non-Muslims can be criminally prosecuted 5 for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad. She says scholars there have effectively argued that the understanding of human rights in Islam is generally consistent with Western notions even where blasphemy 6 is concerned.

UDDIN: The work is as fundamental as just going back to the traditional Islamic texts that were cited in the blasphemy laws as support for punishments for blasphemy and saying, hey, if you go back to the text, it actually says something quite different.

GJELTEN: That's now the prevailing 7 argument of those defending the Universal Declaration. Princeton professor Robert George is a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

ROBERT GEORGE: It is a defamation 8 of Islam to suppose that it cannot embrace a concept of human dignity like we have in the declaration or that it must reject the core rights articulated in the text. And I would say the same is true of the great traditions of Buddhism 9, of Hinduism and so forth 10.

GJELTEN: Seventy years after its adoption 11, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may finally be getting the attention it warrants. Tom Gjelten, NPR News.