Rewind: Most translated document in history
As the visionary Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 75 this year, it continues to provide the mandate for human futures
By Pramod K Nayar
Among the most translated works in the world are the Bible, Shakespeare, Marx and Agatha Christie. But the most translated document in the world and the history of humanity belongs, literally, to another league. This is the 75th anniversary of what is arguably the defining moment in the global history of ideas and the masterplan for humanity.
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In 1948, after two years of fervent debates and discussions ranging from the acrimonious and the sanctimonious to the impenetrably legal, the United Nations released the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Consisting of 30 Articles documenting the freedoms and rights applicable to all humanity, the carefully thought out but not always consensually agreed upon even in the drafting committee but steered with incredible acumen — trying very hard not to impose the American view on all — by Eleanor D Roosevelt as Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UDHR is, however, unfortunately only a declaration and not a Treaty. But its moral and ethical force and the legal outcomes make it one of the most significant texts ever written.
UDHR’s antecedents lie in documents like the 13th century Magna Carta which defined rights, and developed ideas such as the habeas corpus that are still employed for legal redress
The UDHR’s immediate context was the Second World War, but its antecedents lay in documents and ideas that go farther back.
Towards the UDHR
The year is 1215. In England, tired of the unlimited power of the king to claim forest areas for hunting or pleasurable tours, the local barons put together a document limiting the king’s powers. Numerous clauses in the Magna Carta sought to place constraints on the king, but two of these were outstanding, and would provide the impetus to various thinkers, ethicists and lawmakers, from England to America:
No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.
To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.
The first clause would produce the legislation around the world that stated that an imprisoned person must be produced before the court of law to determine if s/he has been lawfully arrested. It said, literally, ‘produce the body’ or the habeas corpus. Sixty-three clauses made up the Magna Carta or the Great Charter, underscoring the due process of the law and the right to justice, which has resonated over time in the form of rights doctrines all over the world.
The first mention of ‘crimes against humanity’ occurs in Edmund Burke’s stirring denouncement of Warren Hastings at the latter’s impeachment in 1788
Then came the French and American Revolutions, and the American Declaration of Independence which also highlighted as indisputable, the foundational rights of humanity which no state power can take away or interfere with.
Said the American Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The French ‘Declaration of Human and Civic Rights’ of 1789 stated:
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.
The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression.
The French document also stated:
Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.
Parallelly, and from a different context, the first mention of ‘crimes against humanity’ – this would later become the guiding principle of the Nuremberg trials and continue to inform the International Court of Justice when trying former dictators like Radovan Karadžić – occurs in politician and philosopher Edmund Burke’s stirring denouncement of Warren Hastings at the latter’s impeachment in 1788. Burke summarised his charges not in legal terms alone when he said:
I impeach him in the name of the Commons’ House of Parliament whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, their right he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank. I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all
‘I impeach him in the name of human nature itself’ and the ‘common enemy’ remain deeply evocative phrases.
But beyond these legal documents, as scholars have noted, the concept of a universal human emerged from Literature too. The novel as a genre was a key development in this regard because, first, it enabled readers to look into the interiority of persons, and second, showed how persons from different strata of society shared similar sentiments.
The UDHR, which opens with ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’, proceeds over the next 30 Articles to outline freedoms and rights, from the individual’s ‘right to life, liberty and the security of person’, the freedom from torture, freedom to nationality but also to seek asylum, freedom of opinion, freedom of equal access to public services and to participate in the cultural life of a community
The sentimental novel, in particular, as Lynn Hunt the historian shows in Inventing Human Rights and the novel of growing-up or the Bildungsroman, as the literary critic Joseph Slaughter argues in Human Rights, Inc, forced the readers to recognise that sentiments are common to working classes, the Africans, women and the elite Englishmen, thus producing a sense of ‘the universality’ of the human. The fiction showed that the black man could suffer pain, feel anger and be happy, just like white men, argue these critics. If the law defined the human person, Literature gave us the language for talking about the human. Literature, not to put too fine a point on it, invented the human, and, therefore, is the main strand in the narrative tradition of Human Rights.
The Holocaust and UDHR
The proceedings of the Drafting Committee, the various Minutes and debates are all available for study. William Schabas’ magisterial collection, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The Travaux Préparatoires, in three volumes, brings together the documentary evidence of the negotiations and debates. The historical minutiae of these discussions, however, are to be found elsewhere: in the events of the Furious ’40s.
The immediate context, of course, is the Second World War, the Holocaust and the 1946 Nuremberg trials of Nazis accused of ‘crime against humanity’. The Nuremberg Charter, on the basis of which 21 of the Nazis were tried (and those like Adolf Eichmann who were caught later), expanded the rubric: ‘the trial of war criminals whose offences have no particular geographical location’, thus moving beyond territorial borders in a universalising gesture. It also defined ‘crimes against humanity’:
Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
Nuremberg set the tone for universalising principles and categorisation of victims and perpetrators but also of different acts — from direct action such as executions and genocide to planning and conspiracy.
The Nuremberg trials, by defining ‘crimes against humanity’, created international criminal codes and procedures but also moral codes for evaluating these heinous acts
Nuremberg also set in motion the processes for setting up of formal structures where ‘crimes against humanity’ can be tried (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court for Rwanda) but also Conventions and legal structures such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Convention Against Torture, etc, all of which expand the ambit set out by the UDHR.
But Nuremberg also influenced UDHR in another way: it highlighted genocides and human rights violations as violations of international criminal law but also as violations of international moral and ethical codes. This, as the political philosopher Johannes Morsink has argued, is the crucial contribution of Nuremberg to the UDHR and, hence, he writes in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Holocaust: there is a ‘causal motivational connection between the Holocaust and the Universal Declaration’.
For thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust, European modernity with its insistence on social ordering, classification of labour, species and people, produced the fear of the stranger, the alien and the Other. Bauman and thinkers like Giorgio Agamben rightly caution us that when a state begins to think in biopolitical terms — alien populations, ‘outsiders’, undeserving citizens — in the name of social order, population control or even demographic databasing, it will produce social discourses of the enemy Other within the borders of the nation state. In the name of inclusion, then, the state embarks on a project of exclusion. In other words, the state manipulates public imaginaries around the alien within the nation, and calls for their expulsion and/or extermination, resulting in a Holocaust.
UDHR@75
The UDHR, which opens with ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’, proceeds over the next 30 Articles to outline freedoms and rights, from the individual’s ‘right to life, liberty and the security of person’, the freedom from torture, freedom to nationality but also to seek asylum, freedom of opinion, freedom of equal access to public services and to participate in the cultural life of a community.
Debates expectedly rage over the presumed ‘Western’ model of defining ‘the human’ as a self-contained, autonomous individual whereas many cultures conceptualise the individual as embedded within relations and social ties. It is not, they suggest, the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather ‘I am because we are’. These debates apart, however, the UDHR has spurred rights movements and thought on indigenous rights, women’s rights and community-driven rights from LGBTQ to Disability Rights. In this sense, UDHR has been universal: it becomes the fount from which all ideas about personhood and personal dignity arise.
UDHR’s antecedents lie in documents like the 13th century Magna Carta which defined rights, and developed ideas such as the habeas corpus that are still employed for legal redress
Interestingly, the UDHR is also being invoked to speak of Environmental Rights and Climate Justice, multispecies justice, and the rights of cyborgs and nonhumans. Scholars debating the personhood of Artificial Beings and cyborgs argue that the human cannot be separated from the nonhuman (animal or machine) because humans coevolve with them. Bioethicists deliberate on the personhood of humans kept alive by machines. Others ask: if humans are enhanced, physiologically, emotionally and morally, would they be the same ‘persons’? The ethical debates are even more convoluted, and again take off from UDHR’s construction of the ‘person’. Thus, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz in Are Cyborgs Persons? writes:
there is no obstacle to acknowledging cyborgs as persons: although they are not human they are embodied, conscious beings, whose specific capacities define ways of relating with the world and with surrounding fellow-beings. These persons do not come from outer or ‘other’ space but are emergent from human persons, in the process of self-commenced transformation, the process of self-guided evolution.
The debates continue as a testament to the importance of the UDHR and its role in defining fundamental freedoms. In many ways, an apotheosis of what the poet Matthew Arnold called ‘the best which is thought and said’ in humanity’s history of ideas, the Declaration is the text that steers, or ought to, our worlds.
It is what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out that defines us.
