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9 - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: origins and echoes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2013

Jay Winter  and
Antoine Prost
Jay Winter
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Antoine Prost
Affiliation:
Université de Paris I
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Summary

On 9 December 1948, René Cassin presented to a plenary session of the General Assembly of the United Nations the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The road that brought him to the Palais de Chaillot was a long one. It passed through many places during and after the Second World War, and brought him to Oslo and the Nobel Peace Prize. But to appreciate fully the thinking that went into his contribution to the Universal Declaration, we must return to inter-war Geneva and the League of Nations.

In Geneva, in the glow of Locarno, and again after the signing of the Kellogg-Briand pact, Cassin and a group of distinguished international jurists thought through the premises on which the absolute sovereignty of the state rested. These explorations in legal theory antedated the Nazi seizure of power, when the contours of what Cassin termed the Leviathan state became visible to all. Then, as we noted in chapter 3, in 1933, a petition for redress presented to the League of Nations by one single man, Franz Bernheim, brought to the fore the importance of giving the individual human being standing in international law. Together these two lines of thinking – truncating the sovereignty of the state and advancing the right of individual petition against violations of rights in the state in which he or she lived – provided the core of Cassin’s approach to human rights in the post-war decade.

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René Cassin and Human Rights
From the Great War to the Universal Declaration
 , pp. 221 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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