Human rights are often seen as one of the success stories in the field of international law and

international relations. When the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, it
was by and large seen as a self-evident framework for managing the relationship between
state, individuals (and communities), the core goal of the Declaration being the wish to
express what ‘human dignity’ is all about. Nowadays though, many political systems around
the world are – either still or again − presenting a different view of human rights, including
setting totally different priorities in the broad field covered these days by the term ‘human
rights’.

Along history, there have been tremendous battles and debates along the concepts or in the name
of human rights. Although people today usually take for granted the rights that are included in the
Convention of the Human Rights, the actual document has been enacted quite late in 1976. If some
rights appear to be logical and natural occurring, there are political rights that could be highly
sensitive and relate to the culture and society to which they are applied to (Donnelly, 2007). In order
to have the best understanding of the universality and protection of human rights, there are two
concepts that need explanation and fixation: human rights and universality. Universality refers to the
characteristic that a factor has to be generally and universally accepted and applicable, in the same
manner, within the same boundaries and at the same level. The simple definition of human rights is
“the rights that one has because one is human” (Donnelly, 2003, p. 7).

BACKGROUND

During World War II, the Allies adopted the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want—as their basic war aims. The United Nations
Charter "reaffirmed faith in fundamental human rights, and dignity and worth of the human
person" and committed all member states to promote "universal respect for, and observance of,
human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or
religion".

When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became fully apparent after World War II, the
consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently
define the rights to which it referred. A universal declaration that specified the rights of individuals
was necessary to give effect to the Charter's provisions on human rights.

The role of women in shaping the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights

Women have left an indelible mark on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Through their pushing particular rights to appear as articles or via changing the very
language of the text, women have influenced the shape of the Declaration since its inception.
Their work made it the universalizing document that it has remained, said Rebecca Adami, a
senior lecturer at Stockholm University in Sweden.
“The counter-narrative I seek to provide fills a gap in studies on human rights and women in
history, tracing the notion of human rights to the UDHR as historically anchored in the
political and economic struggles for emancipation of women throughout the world after the
Second World War,” Adami said. 

Adami has taken a closer look at women’s involvement in the early stages of the international
human rights movement in general and the UDHR in specific in a number of academic papers.
Her book “Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” will be published by
Routledge later this year. It will be launched at an event at the United Nations bookshop in
New York in early December, right before Human Rights Day.

Rights Trail-blazers

Eleanor Roosevelt is certainly the most prominent woman on the Drafting Committee, and
regarded her role in the crafting and securing adoption of the Declaration as her greatest
achievement. She was recognized an outspoken champion of human rights, with the political
and cultural knowledge to secure them in a divided world.

Yet, Adami maintains that little attention has been paid to the contribution of non-Western
women to the drafting and ultimate shape of the UDHR. In her academic work Adami
champions the work of women from these countries, pointing out how they were blazing trails
internationally, as well in their respective countries.

Three non-western female delegates had a particularly strong influence on the Declaration,
according to Adami. They were Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Hansa
Mehta from India, and Begum Shaista Ikramullah from Pakistan.

As a delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1947 to 1948), Hansa Mehta was a
staunch fighter for women’s rights in India and abroad. She is widely credited with making a
significant change in the language of Article 1 of the UDHR, by replacing the phrase “All men
are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal.”

“Her enduring legacy, I would say would be her dedication to the idea that equality of sexes
was a non-negotiable fact,” said Priya Ravichandran, a policy analyst from Bangalore, whose
project “15 for the Republic” researches and collates the life and work of the women who
were instrumental in the founding of the state of India. “Every action of hers stemmed from
that belief. Her work at the UN, within India in the field of education, as a legislative
councillor, as a constituent member, as the first lady of Gujarat, all have that skein running
through them.”

Minerva Bernadino of the Dominican Republic was one of the signers of the UDHR in 1948. A
diplomat and leader in the feminist movement in Latin America and the Caribbean, she was
behind the founding of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. For the Declaration, she
pushed for including the phrase “equality of men and women” in the preamble, among other
changes.

For Begum Shaista Ikramullah, a delegate to the UN Third Committee from Pakistan, her
work on the UDHR was an extension of her deeply held religious, political and social beliefs. A
member of the first parliament of the newly independent Pakistan, she pushed for articles
and language in the UDHR that emphasized freedom, equality and choice. For example, she
championed the inclusion of Article 16 on equal rights in marriage (which she saw as a way to
combat child marriage and forced marriage).

Her commitment to equality and participation on the world stage have been part of the
enduring legacy of her work, said Rafia Zaka, a columnist for Dawn, one of the largest and
oldest newspapers in Pakistan.
“Her work with the UDHR was particularly important because… it showed that feminism is
endemic to Pakistan,” she said. “It helps to impress on me and my generation that the
imprint of women is the thread that holds together my country.”

"Today, the universality of human rights has become a reality, not in the sense that they are now
universally recognized and respected, but in the sense that the claim of human rights has spread to
the whole planet." says Daniele Lochak, a law professor who specializes in human rights. Daniele
Lochak is a member of the ILHR (International League of Human Rights) and gives us a convincing
theory: although they always had a universal - at least on a philosophical level - it is only very recently
that human rights have acquired such an importance globally.Before developing on this theme, we
should make our views more intelligible by defining some key concepts.

The term of ?Human Rights? which is central term to this paper may adopt multiple meanings.
According to Gerard Cornu "Human rights as such, are inherent to humans (male or female) of all
faculties and prerogatives and are considered to belong naturally to every human being with Public
Law. Constitutions require the State to provide respect and protection in accordance with certain
instruments of universal scope.

It is here that the "positive law of human rights", whose aim is to be applied and secured by
institutional arrangements, and belongs to the focal area of the jurist.? But as stated by Frédéric
Sudre, there are two more levels of analysis of human rights, the "ethics of human rights", that is to
say their purely philosophical and moral sides that are unobscured by the drafters of the Declaration
of Human Rights and Citizen of 1789, and the diplomacy of human rights ", i.e the practice of their
political ideology at both national and international levels by political parties, media or humanitarian
associations. This is also known as the politicization of human rights. We must therefore consider this
concept as a whole.

It seems important to stress on the existence of different generations of human rights. The first, was
championed by the constituents of 1791 (the first to incorporate the principles of the DDHC in positive
law) is that which includes the rights and freedoms of man, who is no longer perceived as a single
component of society, but rather as a truly independent individual in a society where human beings
are interdependent and equal. These include the right to freedom of expression and the right to
respect for privacy.

The second generation rights, refer to the collective rights of man. After the Third Republic, one
begins to perceive the shortcomings of overly liberal human rights, that envisages personal protection
and general rights. The the economic and social rights, focusing this time on groups as well as
specific categories of people with accordance to the their social context will emerge. While the first
generation of rights was to restrict the maximum share of the State to guarantee the autonomy of the
individual, the second calls for the intervention by establishing a public service . The implementation
of Rights such as the Right to strike or the Right to health didn't come into force until the end of the
Second World War.

Already in 1989 Louis Henkin believed that although universality may have lacked with the
acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it had developed at that point in
time, at least with respect to their political wide-spread acceptance and legal universality
expressed with their enshrining in the UN Charter and the UN political agenda.1 Moreover,
the writer noted the internationalization, as well as the constitutionalization of human rights
as signs of their slowly growing universality, however he had to acknowledge the lack of
universality with regard to the de facto respect for these rights. This is something that was
briefly mentioned above in this short paper and precisely this, in my opinion, is the biggest
problem with regard to the universality of human rights, their enforcement. Although in some
areas of the globe there are already specialized ways for individuals to enforce their rights,
for example the European Court of Human Rights, which is unique in the international
1
Henkin, L., “The Universality of the Concept of Human Rights”, Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, Vol. 506, Human Rights around the World, 1989, pp. 10-16.
community for its accessibility by individuals, this is certainly not so for other parts of the
world. Enforceability of human rights is certainly a problem that many academics have
struggled with.

Backdrop of change

The UDHR was developed in the wake of the atrocities of World War II and the lack of respect
for human rights. The task of drafting the Declaration fell to the UN Commission on Human
Rights, but its content was influenced by several other UN bodies, such as the Third
Committee of the UN General Assembly, as well as NGOs, such as the International Union of
Catholic Women’s Leagues.

The UDHR was also written at a time when colonial empires were just beginning to break up,
Adami wrote. The fact that female representatives on the various UN committees from these
newly independent countries had experienced inequality as women “helps explain their
success (as female representatives were in the minority but active during sessions) in
changing the wording from ‘men’ to ‘all human beings’ and inserting the notion of non-
discrimination based on sex into the declaration,” she said.

And today, this inherent equality in the Declaration still holds true, said Veronica Birga, who
heads the UN Human Rights Office’s section on women’s human rights and gender.

“The demand for equality between men and women, which was voiced in the drafting of the
UDHR, still rings true today,” she said. “The past year, from the global women’s marches, to
#TimesUp, women are standing up, speaking out, and continuing to change the world.”

UNIVERSALITY

The report makes a number of claims about what ought to count as a human right: for
example, that it is every human being’s right not to be enslaved, and that it is every human
being’s right to marry and found a family. How are such claims to be understood?
Specifically, are they put forward as principles that everyone ought to accept regardless of his
or her religion or cultural tradition, or are they meant merely to reflect the values of a
particular segment of the human population? To say that freedom from enslavement is a
human right is not merely to express a preference for living in a world in which no one is
enslaved. It is also not merely to say that freedom from slavery is an ideal to which we
happen to subscribe but that others are free to reject in favor of a competing ideal. It is to say
that enslaving people deprives them of a condition of life to which they are entitled
inalienably as a result of being human. There is no way to understand this claim as simply the
expression of a mere preference; it is put forward and urged on everybody as a matter of
principle. But how is such a principled commitment to avoid coming across as disrespectful
towards the potentially vast number of human beings who may disagree with a particular
human rights claim? The claim about slavery may no longer be controversial in our time; but
the claim about marriage, for example, is an occasion for much controversy with different
interpretations both advanced and rejected by large numbers of people around the globe. If
we adopt a particular view, are we not in danger of just imposing our own values on others,
without consideration of their opposing points of view? We do not think so. First, when a
claim, any claim, is put forward as true, that is not the same thing as saying that it is put
forward as certain, or infallible, or not open to rational discussion. The claim needs to be
backed up with reasons and arguments, and any reasons and arguments on the other side need
to be listened to, considered, and answered. We have sought to arrive at the moral
conclusions about human rights that seem to us most justified by what we judge to be the best
moral thinking of our time. However, we remain entirely sensitive to the possibility that we
have fallen short and invite anyone who disagrees with our conclusions to assert and argue
the countervailing considerations. Second, many expressions of human rights – including
those of the UDHR – allow for a certain amount of contextual variation. For example, the
UDHR is emphatic in Articles 10 and 11 that people have the right to due process when they
are accused of any crime, but the legal systems of the world vary in their procedural
arrangements and, within broad limits, the UDHR respects such variations. Finally, the
formulations of human rights declarations are often vague and abstract, and they leave certain
issues unsettled and open to interpretation. These are often matters of good-faith
disagreement within particular countries and between particular countries. So, for example,
some countries may regard corporal punishment as consistent in principle with Article 5 (the
anti-torture provision) while other countries emphatically reject this. Similarly, some
countries may see the disenfranchisement of convicted prisoners as consistent with Article 21
(the democracy provision) while others will disagree. This openness of the UDHR is one of
its great virtues. It does not preclude the emergence of a checkerboard of interpretations
around the world of its various provisions, reflecting what European human rights lawyers
call a “margin of appreciation” for discrete national practices and sensibilities. The room for
interpretation is not unlimited, but the provisions of the Declaration were not intended to
settle every last detail.

Article 2. [the universality provision] Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set
forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language,
religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or
international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be
independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS FROM A QUASI-LEGAL AND A LEGAL

PERSPECTIVE

Dealing with the universality of human rights from a quasi-legal and a legal perspective is the
easiest part of the story. The UDHR infers the notion of the universality of human rights in its
name. And despite wanting to take their word for it, it remains important to be cautious with
the word – even in relation to the Universal Declaration, because, amongst other good
reasons, in 1948 the UN comprised only 58 states, eight of them abstaining from voting for
various reasons, compared with 193 now. It was particularly during the 1950s and 1960s that
many sovereign states were added, mainly as a result of the process of de-colonisation, and
subsequently through more incidental events such as the disintegration of states like
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

The question of what the 134 new states would have contributed to the discussions on the
UDHR in 1946-1948 and what they would have done in a vote on this is obviously hard to
answer with absolute certainty. However, for many of them it is well known that they
subsequently supported the UDHR, be it in various ways, especially while meeting at the two
World Conferences on Human Rights, in Tehran (1968) and in Vienna (1993). In the
document of the latter conference, the UN member states endorse sentences in which the
UDHR is characterised as a “common standard of achievement” and a “source of
inspiration”, even though it was also determined that the “significance of national and
regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be
borne in mind”. In a September 2005 core document, adopted by the UN General Assembly
at the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the UN, the words of 1993 were repeated: We
reaffirm that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interrelated, interdependent and
mutually reinforcing and that all human rights must be treated in a fair and equal manner, on
the same footing and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional
particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in
mind, all States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, have the duty to
promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms. Commenting upon similar
words, used in successive UN documents, the Dutch Advisory Council on International
Affairs stated twelve years ago that “universality is not uniformity”.34 This refers to the
“margin of appreciation”, which states do have with regard to the achievement of human
rights. There is an inherent tension in the wording of the 2005 document, but on a positive
note, it repeats, in line with numerous other documents, the indivisibility and interrelatedness
of all human rights; it underlines the notion that they are mutually reinforcing each other; it
restates the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural
and religious backgrounds; and it emphasises that all states have to live up to all human
rights, “regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems”. But, what about the
interaction between these four notions? What does it mean for daily international practice that
states have to “bear in mind” the significance of national and regional particularities and
various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds when discussing human rights
practices? Most would be willing to believe that the 1993 and the 2005 documents can be
seen as progress, because, as former US President Jimmy Carter once noted, “in the life of
the human spirit words are action”; but one cannot easily hold that such a typical UN
consensus formula solves the problem of universality, not in the field of the norms, let alone
in the field of practice.

The world also witnessed two world wars which brought with them sheer violation of human
rights in the form of torn and shattered humanity so after this tormentation new awakening
among the nations burst forth. And the idea got a concrete shape as the UN came out in 1948
with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stressed upon-four basic rights i.e.
civil, political, social and economic. Apart from making provisions in these forms of rights,
two international covenants on economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political
rights were also passed by it. Others are as Declaration of Elimination of all Forms of Racial
Discrimination, (1963); Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination,
(1965) Convention of the Elimination all Forms of Discrimination against Woman 1979,
Convention against Torture 1984, Bond of Principles for the Protection of all Persons under
any Form of Detention or Imprisonment 1988 and Vienna Declaration 1993. These all have
been instrumental in this world wide movement called protection of human rights. All the
signatory countries are bound to provide these rights to her citizens as UN has proclaimed a
common standard of achievement of these rights for all the people of all nations.

Following the international provision of UN, India too being the signatory of the UN as its
original or founder member also gave with to the concept through the two major legislations.
It is the passing of protection of human rights act December 1993 under which national
human rights commission and Punjab human rights commission was established.

CONCLUSION:

Human rights have come a long way, and are often seen as one of the success stories in the
field of international law and international relations since WWII. Despite all controversies on
a conceptual and practical level and despite the need to operate in a way that combines ideals
to multiple senses of reality, there is no doubt that we are in the midst of processes of
constitutionalisation and humanisation of the international economic and political order, with
human rights values leading the way. The core word is ‘universalisation’, constantly looking
for a process approach with an open eye for obstacles. Making human rights universal, means
to contextualise within the margins set at the international level, with a special emphasis on
peremptory standards of international human rights law, and with the use of all available
instruments where possible and indicated, from silent diplomacy to assessments by
international supervisory bodies, and whatever other action that might have a realistic chance
to be successful. That might include actions such as ‘country resolutions’ adopted by the UN
Human Rights Council or even economic sanctions, although such approaches rarely lead to
durable solutions. The latter relates to the fact that they are coercive and often top-down only.
The alternative is adding a bottom-up approach, as presented here, and to fundamentally
reconsider the effectiveness of the mechanisms used so far. In such lines of action, there is a
huge role for the civil society (NGOs, local leaders, companies, trade unions), in order to
make the message tailor-made and (more) likely to be effective in the long run. Such civil
society actions should not be conducted by representatives 226 with legal training only, but
also by people with a background in, for instance, anthropology, history, political science,
theology and economics. This is vital, in order to make the discussions start from the right
assumptions and to guarantee that the actions are contextualised as much as possible, and
thus have a better chance to change the daily lives of people all over the world.