"Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; theneighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
--Eleanor Roosevelt (1958) 1

" Barely had the fifty government delegations officiously settled themselves down in San Francisco that spring of 1945 than they were reminded of the most important lesson of the Nazi holocaust: human dignity belongs not to sovereign states but to sovereign individuals. Were it not for a few of those individuals at that Charter-writing session of the United Nations, the new international organization would have given human rights and fundamental freedoms, as observer John P. Humphrey has noted, "only a passing reference."2

To Humphrey, later appointed the United Nations' first Director of the Division of Human Rights, it was clear that what saved the Charter from this omission were the lobbying efforts at the San Francisco conference by a number of small countries and by the representatives of some forty-two private organizations brought in by the United States as consultants.

The latter group were the "spokesmen in the corridors"3 on behalf of human rights. They were responsible for making the promotion and encouragement of "respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion"4 one of the main purposes of the U.N. They were responsible for the mandate given to the General Assembly to initiate studies and make recommendations which would assist in the "realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction....''5 They were responsible for the order to the Economic and Social Council to "set up commissions. . . for the promotion of human rights.6

The delegates from Chile and Cuba pushed for Charter articles that would specify and guarantee human rights. Panama wanted a separate bill of rights included in the Charter. Though these proposals were rejected as too controversial, they were remembered. And at least the "consultants" had gotten enough momentum and machinery written into the document to open a back door.

At the closing session of the conference President Harry Truman opened the door even wider. "We have good reason to expect," he told the delegates, "the framing of an international bill of rights . . . that . . . will be as much a part of international life as our own Bill of Rights is a part of our Constitution."7 As events would later prove, that was not so much a prophetic statement as it was the beginning of a crusade.

To make good on the promise of raising a standard that would be a passport to justice anywhere in the world would be a difficult and seditious enterprise. For many nations it would require a revolution in the laws, institutions and customs that governed often-lopsided relationships between the individual and the state. For all nations it would mean a radical departure from the hallowed grounds that supported a faith in the sanctity of domestic sovereignty.

However stout the international moral fiber as a result of Hitler's mad havoc, the world was still a house divided: by dozens of shades of political and economic ideologies, by hundreds of thousands of religious, class, cultural and race barriers, by dictators who still enjoyed riding roughshod over hapless millions. Even as the United Nations was declaring its determination "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,"8 Joseph Stalin was continuing to purge his Soviet state of dissidents, Francisco Franco was consolidating a dictatorship in Spain, Anastasio Somoza was grabbing the reigns of power in Nicaragua, racism was scandalizing the United States.

So to the difficult task of organizing a consensus among world governments was added the gritty complication that a consensus to honor human rights was an agreement to undermine government autonomy. At bottom, human rights were an usurpation of state power.