The 75th Anniversary of the
UN Human Rights Declaration
By Anne Rethmann

Today, on December 10, we mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Declaration). This document was once associated with the normative promise that humanity could change for the better. However, social and political problems have not disappeared. A necessary criticism of existing conditions has increasingly turned into a rejection of the very idea of human rights. This idea is accused of being ineffective in combating injustice, of representing a Eurocentric pseudo-concept in its emphasis on the individual, and of being just another moralizing, humanistic sermon that ultimately facilitates the geopolitical interests of certain states. In the following, I take up the early years of the drafting process, or rather, the philosophical foundations of the human rights regime that are worth remembering, and with them human rights’ normative promise of real change.

The historical moment of the Declaration is remarkable: Three years after the end of World War II, which saw the killing of millions of civilians and the almost complete annihilation of the European Jews by the Nazi regime, the drafters of the Declaration proclaimed on December 10, 1948, that the highest priority be given both to freedom of speech and belief and to freedom from fear and want. The Declaration is closely associated with Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), who chaired the drafting committee, but in fact it was the French Jewish jurist René Cassin (1887-1976) who wrote the first draft of this important document. The Declaration itself was not legally binding, but it marked the beginning of the juridification of human rights and the introduction into global legal discourse of the luminous concept of human dignity, which is proclaimed not only in the preamble of the Declaration but also in Article 1 as a human right. Although the notion of human dignity, at first glance, seems to be a trivial matter of terminology, in fact the questions of what human rights denote, and what and whom they are supposed to protect, are still shaped by our understanding of human dignity. 

It was Franz Rudolf Bienenfeld (1886-1961), a Vienna-born lawyer of Jewish origin, who addressed these issues, both practically – as a representative of the World Jewish Congress, he took part in deliberations of the draft Declaration – and theoretically, developing his notion of a universal language of human rights. In his book Rediscovery of Justice, published in 1947, he argued that what revived the idea of natural law in legal theory was not so much legal scholars’ interest in the history of ideas, but rather the lived experience of the Nazis’ transformation of “lawlessness into law”. The law – especially human rights – cannot be justified only in formal legal terms, but also requires a substantive benchmark, which Bienenfeld described as the “minimum right of individualism”. In his view, an international human rights framework must ensure that individuals can speak for themselves and have a certain degree of security and freedom. With his reflections on dignity, human rights, and justice, Bienenfeld wanted to show that law is based not only on repression but also on factors that make freedom possible in the first place.

Fourteen years later, the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) published the book Natural Law and Human Dignity, which evokes Bienenfeld's understanding of dignity. Bloch likened human dignity to “the upright gait”, the opposite of subjugation and humiliation. He also considered the important question of how harsh social conditions impede individual self-determination, emphasizing that human rights cannot be truly realized without an end to exploitation, but also that exploitation cannot truly end without the realization of human rights.

For both these authors, the self-thinking, self-reflecting individual is the basis for solidarity – which isn’t a question of pity, charity, or even morality but, as Bienenfeld repeatedly emphasized, an indispensable prerequisite for survival. That is why their writings are still relevant today, when solidarity seems more precarious than ever. We need a humanist politics, a political constitution of society based on individual human rights. This is not an expression of naive optimism or blind faith in humanity, but a dystopian awareness of what it means to be without rights and protection in the modern world.  Bienenfeld knew this when he wrote, “a crucial stage in human affairs has been reached – the stage at which it must be decided whether the desire of adolescent and fatherless humanity to live by tolerance and voluntary co-operation is stronger than the impulse for aggression and destruction”.

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