Glendon: U.N. rights document shows recognition of common principles

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) – The drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 60 years ago and its adoption by almost every country in the world demonstrate that all peoples can recognize some basic common principles, said the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

The declaration "serves today as the principal common reference point for cross-cultural discussions of how we are to order the human future in an increasingly interdependent world," said Dalton, Mass., native Mary Ann Glendon, the ambassador.

The U.S. embassy, with support from the Costa Rican and Chilean embassies to the Vatican, sponsored a May 2 forum looking at "Latin America and the International Human Rights Project."

Glendon plans to organize three more conferences this year marking the 60th anniversary of the U.N. declaration.

She told the forum that when preparations were being made for the founding of the United Nations, "the idea that the purposes of the U.N. might include protection of human rights was far from the minds of the major powers" – the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. "In fact, their draft proposal mentioned human rights only once, in passing."

Glendon said it was thanks in part to pressure from Latin American countries that the U.N. Charter ended up mentioning human rights seven times and that the U.N. Human Rights Commission was established.

She said the Latin American approach to human rights, "greatly indebted to Catholic social thought," also was evident in the universal declaration. She said the approach had broad appeal because of "its emphasis that rights are subject to duties and limitations."

"The U.N. declaration, in its present form, differs in striking ways from Anglo-American rights instruments – most noticeably in its inclusion of social and economic rights," she said. "But it also differs from Soviet-style charters in its strong emphasis on political and civil liberties and in its recognition of the importance of intermediate structures between citizen and state."

The fact that the declaration was drafted, passed and adopted by so many countries after the devastation of World War II, she said, "provides encouraging evidence that we human beings are not merely tossed about on the tides of history, but that we can, to some extent, affect the course of events through reflection and choice."

The promoters of the declaration were not naive optimists, Glendon said, but they did see that it was possible to promote a clear enunciation and gradual acceptance of "a small core of principles – principles so fundamental to human dignity that they could be called universal."

The ambassador said she hoped Latin American countries would continue contributing to respect for human rights on a universal level by defending them from increasingly "relativistic and selective approaches" to human rights, which are based more on satisfying the interests of an individual or group than on protecting all human beings.