Fifty years ago, on December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the United Nations General Assembly. This has had a tangible impact on the world we live in and has been the catalyst for many positive advances over the last five decades. Herewith, we offer you a brief look at its development. We then review some of its salient articles, profiting from fifty years of experience, social development and change. We then offer a few modest suggestions for updating several of its crucial points.

Some of us were adults back then and remember the events that led up to and surrounded the Declaration. Others have been told about, or have read about, this. But, sadly, a large percen-tage of the citizens of the United States know nothing about this and, to be honest, care less.

Everyone back then knew of the Nazi atrocities. Many had been told and knew of, or at least suspected, similar atrocities by Stalin. It was a time of beginning of rebuilding, of the Marshall Plan, but also the hardening of the lines between the West and Russia.

Well known was what had happened under totalitarian regimes in the 1930s, 1940s and during World War II. The systematic violation of human rights had brought death, destruction and misery upon humanity. Hundreds of millions of people had been deprived of their basic human rights, had no say in public life, had no freedom of conscience and no right to express their own opinions.

This “Universal Declaration” was created in the shadow of the concentration and extermination camps at a time when there were still millions of displaced people - refugees who had streamed across central Europe and still had not yet been settled. Large areas of the world, in effect, lay not just in material, but also in moral ruin.

In this climate, like perhaps no other time in history, the importance of elementary human rights was glaringly clear. It was a time when it seemed that everyone was ready to change society - to change it in ways to ensure that the Holocaust, and all of the evils surrounding the Nazis, would never occur again.

But it was also in the shadow of imperialistic, Marxist Communism which had occupied eastern Europe and was spreading its tentacles over much of the world. Many underdeveloped nations were threatened or had been swallowed up by Communist ideology. It is in this context that this Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

A beginning had been President Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union message in January 1941 when he announced his famous “Four Freedoms”, upon which a post-war international order was to be founded. They were: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

The United Nations founding charter was passed in San Francisco in 1945. It introduced something quite new in world history. For the first time in international law, member states of the United Nations agreed to respect and protect human rights. The U.N. charter itself spoke of human rights but did not define them as to which specifically needed protection. In 1946, it assigned this task to a Commission on Human Rights which set up an 8 member committee led by Elenor Roosevelt, to draft this document.

Members of this commission were a true rainbow of religious, social and national groups. A 400-page outline served as the basic working paper for the Committee. The Commission slowly came to a focus but was polarized by opposition by the Communist bloc. The differences were insuperable. While the Declaration presupposes that all men are naturally free, equal under the law and have unalienable rights, the Marxist states claimed that the individual’s position and rights were determined solely by his class and the respective conditions of production. The individual and his well being, to them, was not the basis and aim of all political activity, but instead he was reduced to being the means for collective aims. Human rights, as the West knew them and wanted them, were held in contempt. Accordingly, after an unsuccessful attempt to influence the Declaration to the Marxist way of thinking, those states withdrew their support.

After two years of negotiations, a draft was submitted to the U.N. General Assembly. Finally, after 1,400 rounds of voting on practically every word and clause, the Universal Declaration was passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations without a dissenting vote on December 10, 1948. The Communist countries abstained from voting.

In 1948 the Berlin Airlift began, the State of Israel was founded. In September of that year the World Medical Association issued its famous Declaration of Geneva which spoke of protection for human life from conception.

That was fifty years ago. We are now at the end of what has been probably the bloodiest century in the past two millenia. In some ways the world has improved vastly with the collapse of the Soviet Union as a Communist empire and the flowering of representative governments in so many areas of the world. But at the same time we are only too well aware of the internal moral decay of the last several decades. It is time to look back but also to look ahead, time for a basic re-examination of this Declaration. Accordingly, let us examine certain articles of the Declaration which, developments have shown, need reclarification, strengthening and, the insertion of one entirely new Article.

Overview

In a number of places, the document uses the generic “man” to indicate mankind or both men and women. This was fully understood fifty years ago. This is not necessarily true today, and so a general change should be made in various places to say: “men and women”. This would eliminate any possibility of interpreting these stated rights to vest only in men and not in women, a fact which sadly is the case yet in some nations in the world.

There are 30 Articles. Even though each of them is stated very succinctly, the total length is such as to make it impractical for us to reprint the entire document in this paper. If any of you who wish a complete copy, feel free to write us.

Article 2 said: “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.” This one lacks something. There should not be a distinction according to age, for that is a major factor in the push for euthanasia. In addition people are being killed who have varying degrees of disability. That was not in the document, and so we feel it should be inserted. Accordingly, we have added “age” and “disability or condition of dependency”. By doing this, we include the issues of euthanasia, infanticide and abortion. And so we add in the lines of Article 2: “Distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex”. Now insert: “age, disability or condition of dependency” - and it goes on from there.

Article 6 did read: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” Let’s remember that abortion has been introduced in some nations, specifically the U.S., by the re-definition of the word “person” to exclude those not yet born. So this one has a huge loophole which should be closed. Accordingly, the revision should now state: “Everyone, from the beginning of their life at fertilization, has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

Article 12 --- this is an example of change and adding “or her” for gender specificity-which impacts on the areas that concern pro-life, pro-family people. It states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his [or her] privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his [or her] honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

Article 16 states: “(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”

This looked sufficient fifty years ago, but marriage is under relentless attack today, so let us look to improve it. One of the areas that was completely taken for granted back then was the primacy of marriage and its central role in all of society. Marriage between a man and a woman was given special status hemmed in by various laws. The partners were, far more than now, legally, contractually bound one to the other. Parents had legal control of their children. No one questioned this. They were primarily responsible for their children’s education, for their health, their upbringing. No one questioned this. The laws of a nation, the community in which they lived supported parents in this role regarding their children.

But now this has changed to a significant extent, and there are forces abroad, specifically the tremendous power of United Nations agencies, which are tearing the family apart, and which are determined to create new family structures, specifically homosexual ones. There are forces which are tearing children away from their parents, forces which are assuming control of children. They would grant to a child degrees of independence and defiance of their parents never before known in history. The family is being sorely threatened.

And so let us flesh out Article 16: Leave (1) and (2) intact, but let us re-write (3): “Marriage between a man and a woman, and the resultant family, constitutes the basic unit of society. The rights of a husband and wife to bear children shall not be infringed. As parents, they exercise, in love, the primary guardianship of their children and, with this, primary control of their educational, religious, social and medical needs. The family, as the natural and fundamental group unit of society is entitled to protection by society and the state.”

A complete review leads us to suggest that one new article should be added. Let’s title it “Article 31”, although it would logically be inserted a bit earlier. This is an area that wasn’t even thought of back then - the area of medical experimentation. Yes, that had been done by Nazi doctors, but that had been so abhorrent that apparently it was felt it was not necessary to even mention it - or perhaps there were other reasons, but it was not included. Certainly, back then no one was thinking of the kind of destructive experimentation on living human embryos and on fetal babies in their mothers’ wombs that is being practiced today. This protection must be sewed into the document. Accordingly, let us look at this new article.

Article 31: “No one, from the beginning of his or her life at fertilization shall be subjected to medical treatment or experimentation without the valid, informed consent of the subject, or from the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of the individual.”

To obtain a complete copy of the 1948 Declaration, plus a complete copy of the revised 1998 Declaration, please send US$8.00 to address below.

John C. Willke, MD

President

International Right to Life Federation

1802 W. Galbraith Road

Cincinnati, OH 45239, United States of America

Phone +1 513 729 3600

Fax +1 513 729 3636

E-mail info@lifeissues.org