U.S. Department of State Fiscal Year 2020 Agency Financial Report

Attempting to Expand Recognition of Unalienable Rights: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights U nalienable rights direct attention to the relation between citizens and the government to which they have consented. Yet as rights inherent in all human beings, they also have implica- tions for the conduct of foreign affairs. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was inspired in part by “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” which compelled the founders to “declare the causes which impel them” to vindicate their unalienable rights by setting up a new form of government. The implications for foreign affairs of the nation’s grounding in human rights are more diffuse and indirect than they are for domestic affairs, but the self-evident truths concerning individual freedom and human equality on which the United States was founded nevertheless should inform and elevate America’s conduct in the world. Perhaps the United States’ most explicit commitment to promoting abroad the rights all human beings share received expression in the undertaking that culminated in December 1948 with the approval in the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By taking that step, the United States affirmed the correspondence between its founding convic- tions and the UDHR’s universal political standard. In the post– World War II, atomic-age world – rendered smaller and more interconnected by successive revolutions in transportation and communications – Americans embraced the obligation to foster, as the UDHR states, “universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Since then, much of American diplomacy can be seen as a struggle to integrate the obligation to advance human rights around the world with the variety of other obligations that go into the formation of a coherent foreign policy suitable for the world’s most prosperous and powerful liberal democracy. The idea that certain principles are so fundamental as to apply to all human beings everywhere was, as we have seen, embedded in the American founding, and has an ancient pedigree in the world’s religious and philosophical traditions. Yet the question of what universality might mean in the modern world loomed large in 1945 when the newly founded United Nations embarked on the preparation of what was then called an “International Bill of Rights.” So large, in fact, that UNESCO convened a group of the world’s best known philosophers in 1947 to study whether an agreement on basic principles was “conceivable among men who come from the four corners of the earth and who belong not only to different cultures and civilizations, but to different spiritual families and antagonistic schools of thought.” After consulting widely with Confucian, Hindu, Muslim, and Western thinkers, the UNESCO philosophers reported that “certain great principles” were widely shared, though “stated in terms of different philosophic principles and on the background of different political and economic systems.” Their survey indicated that some things are so terrible in practice that almost no one will publicly approve them, and that there are certain goods so widely valued that almost no one will publicly oppose them. That was enough, in their view, to make agreement on an international declaration possible. Such a document, they advised, should not aim “to achieve doctrinal consensus but rather to achieve agreement concerning rights, and also concerning action in the realization and defense of rights, which may be justified on highly divergent grounds.” On December 10, 1948, the philosophers’ assessment was validated when the UN General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a single dissenting vote. French Thomist Jacques Maritain, one of the most highly regarded philosophers of the 20th Century, had a role in shaping the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, imbuing it with intellectual depth and rigor not common in modern international affairs pronouncements. 102 | U ni ted S tates D epartment of S tate 2020 A gency F inanci al R eport