1948 U.N. declaration is the sanity we need now

Dec. 11, Rick Halperin, the director of the SMU Dallas Human Rights Program, along with John Vernon, law professor SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law, for a commentary advocating that world leaders reconsider and recommit to the tenets and spirit considered 75 years ago when the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was drafted.  Published in the Dallas Morning news under the heading 1948 U.N. declaration is the sanity we need now: https://tinyurl.com/37u87eay 

It is hard for most Americans to fathom the wounded state of the world as it was in October 1945.

The Northern Hemisphere was in ruins. Europe, the Soviet Union, much of Asia and particularly Japan were coming to grips with the utter devastation wreaked by World War II during which 70 million people, mostly civilians, were killed.

In 1945, there was no understanding of the Holocaust, which had claimed the lives of 17 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish. Two atomic bombs had been dropped late in the war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, unleashing the atomic age. All of this had come on the deadly heels of World War I, which had claimed at least 20 million lives, half of whom were civilians.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of a universal code of human dignity.

By Rick Halperin and John Vernon

It is hard for most Americans to fathom the wounded state of the world as it was in October 1945.

The Northern Hemisphere was in ruins. Europe, the Soviet Union, much of Asia and particularly Japan were coming to grips with the utter devastation wreaked by World War II during which 70 million people, mostly civilians, were killed.

In 1945, there was no understanding of the Holocaust, which had claimed the lives of 17 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish. Two atomic bombs had been dropped late in the war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, unleashing the atomic age. All of this had come on the deadly heels of World War I, which had claimed at least 20 million lives, half of whom were civilians.

The horrors of these wars were supposed to have taught us something. Yet, here we are again in the final weeks of 2023, seemingly on the brink of a new doomsday chapter bubbling up around the Middle East; one that, without much prompting, could become another all-consuming global crisis.

Just three years after the end of World War II, the human race found the sense to ponder a more peaceful planet. Leaders drafted and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948.

A United Nations summary says it was “drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world. The Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris … as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages.”

The post-WWII goal of the United Nations was to try to initiate a global understanding that all people, everywhere, are entitled to fundamental and inherent basic rights. Article 1 of the 30 articles in the Declaration states: “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.” Dignity is the foundation of all human rights, because all people have intrinsic value.

The document, signed by most of the members of the U.N., covered the basic civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights to be guaranteed to all people everywhere. Even with the tensions surrounding the onset of the Cold War, there was still the hope, the idealism, the vision that governments worldwide would have learned that the wages of war beget only more suffering and death.

In 1945, most countries were governed by the common belief that there was a hierarchy of privileged groups in each society. America was still a brutally racist society, dominated by the legal system of “separate but equal” as expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its notorious 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision.

It was a period with an active commitment to eugenics, in which approximately 70,000 Americans, between 1907 and 1977 — overwhelmingly poor and people of color — were legally sterilized without their knowledge or consent.

More than 120,000 Japanese Americans had been interned in camps between 1942 and 1945. It was an era in which both the American medical and legal professions played leading roles in efforts designed to degrade, debase, humiliate, punish or injure certain groups, all in the name of the law.

Genocides and mass violence have plagued the world in almost every decade since, including the deaths of more than 500,000 people in Indonesia in 1965, 2 million people annihilated in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, mass violence in Iraq in the 1980s, genocide in both Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s, genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, and current brutalities inflicted against both the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the Uyghurs in China.

In 2023, fundamental human rights are still under assault. People disappear and are abused, tortured, or killed merely because of who they are, or who they allegedly are, and frequently with complete impunity.

Mind-boggling violence was unleashed by Hamas in the Middle East on Oct. 7, and once more the world struggles to come to grips with the barbarism of warfare in which civilians are the primary targets. Despite our best efforts, we seem to be on a course that leads to more persecution and global tragedy.

Before it’s too late, we should reconsider the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims every person has the inherent rights to life, liberty, and security of the person. The lessons of “Never Again” must be shared among the generations to remind us of the importance of a just and equitable society, where the rule of law prevails, and human rights are protected without prejudice.

As we commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ 75th anniversary, it would behoove us all to become more educated and aware of our own rights as well as the rights of all 8 billion people on the planet.

As 2023 draws to a close and we look back on the unspeakable violence unleashed across the globe, we must again, as was done in 1948, call upon the commitment to the vision for a better, saner, and more peaceful world for ourselves, our children and subsequent generations for a common human future. A civilized society’s future depends on it.

“Never Again” is now.

Rick Halperin is the director of the SMU Human Rights Program. John Vernon is a professor at the SMU Dedman School of Law.

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