Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Following her husband’s death in December 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed by President Harry S. Truman a member of the American delegation to the United Nations assembly in London. Having accepted the challenge, she emerged at the first meeting as an international stateswoman. From 1946 to 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt served as a member of the US delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations, and she was one of the US representatives of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations until she assumed an even more challenging task as US representative and later as Chairperson on the Commission on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The paper explores Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities and her formative role on the Commission and it offers to deal with how she made use of her former experience and what methods she applied in the negotiations, debates over the necessity for universal human rights, as well as the actual drafting of the document itself. As a result, the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, can be considered as the greatest achievement in Eleanor Roosevelt’s career. For her, it was the Magna Carta of humankind, which, indeed, has become the archetype of the international structures designed to protect human rights worldwide.