When you hear the words “The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights” — or the UDHR — what are the first things to come to mind? Equality? Freedom? Justice for all? You’d be right on the surface — these are the very values the document claims to represent. 

However, when you look closer at the world in 1948, it reveals a vastly different picture. The UDHR was a document created out of contradiction. It was framed as a way to enforce universal rights while the countries behind its creation were violating them. 

The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations on Dec. 10, 1948 in light of World War II. On the surface, it was a groundbreaking moment. For the first time in history, countries came from around the world to unanimously declare that every person was entitled to basic rights, regardless of race, gender, religion or nationality. 

But there was a major problem. When the document was being written, most of Africa and a significant amount of Asia were still under colonial rule. The UN Commission on Human Rights was the body specifically created to define what human rights would look like for the entire world. It originally had 18 members, but the formal drafting committee only included eight countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, Australia, Chile, China and Lebanon. 

Six of these eight countries were Western or Western-aligned powers. Disappointingly, none of the three sovereign countries of Africa had a seat at the table. 

Although the document was marketed as universal, it was written by a small fraction of it. A small group of mostly Western countries played the biggest role in deciding what universal rights should look like.

The Western influence showed up even in documents that are closely tied to the UDHR. The UN Charter is the founding document of the United Nations. Its preamble begins with “We the peoples of the United Nations” — a statement almost identical to the U.S. Constitution’s “We the People.” This kind of language is a clear indicator of whose worldview was considered when the document was written. You cannot claim to speak for the world when most of the world was not allowed in the room.

Even as the document was being written, a Saudi Arabian delegate pushed back and said the drafters were only considering Western values while ignoring the rest of the world. I couldn’t agree more with his point. The UDHR was built around individual rights such as free speech, right to a fair trial and personal property.

Human rights experts in the field have argued that the UDHR reflects a very Western way of thinking. If you look at the structure of the document itself, the way it lists individual rights and protections mirrors the U.S. Bill of Rights and its amendments one-to-one. 

The hypocrisy becomes even more apparent when you look at what was happening in the world during the time of the UDHR’s creation. The declaration was adopted in 1948, the same year apartheid was formally introduced in South Africa. Apartheid legally enforced racial discrimination, the exploitation of Black South Africans and total racial segregation. South Africa’s government, notably under the British Crown, actually refused to ratify the UDHR because the document contradicted everything apartheid stood for. 

Meanwhile in the U.S., segregation was still legal. Black Americans were being denied basic rights through Jim Crow laws, and they didn’t even gain the right to vote until 1965. These examples show that the countries who helped write this declaration were either actively oppressing their own citizens or staying silent while others did. 

The sole inclusion of Western countries in the UDHR is especially frustrating when you realize that cultures across Africa, Asia and the Middle East have always placed just as much importance on collective rights. They did not need the West to define rights for them. For example, the African proverb, “Ubuntu” is rooted in the idea that a person’s well-being is tied to their community, not just themselves. All of these non-Western values were left out in the UDHR. 

So what do we do with a declaration that had good intentions but left out millions of the very people it was supposed to protect? The answer is to not just let it be, but rather to do better. 

It means making sure these declarations are actually enforced and not just pretty words on paper. It means holding powerful countries to the same standards they expect from everyone else. If human rights are truly for everyone, then everyone deserves a voice in defining them.

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