When we read generally about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which we underline the 75e anniversary this month, we learn that this founding document of human rights must be credited to the American Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the committee and the editorial staff, and to the great René Cassin, a French jurist who received the Nobel Prize for peace for this achievement. Digging a little further, we also learn that the Canadian John Humphrey himself developed the first versions of the Declaration.
When we continue to search, we come across texts like that of Professor William Schabas, who reveals that Canada was not very keen on the idea of adopting this declaration, having even abstained during the vote in committee, to change his mind and vote in favor during the plenary of the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. All in all, the first story of the adoption of the Declaration seems to us to be consistent with what we knew, namely that Western men carried out the work of this International Declaration, which became universal at the suggestion of René Cassin.
However, thanks to the research of professors and researchers such as Rebecca Adami, who published in 2021, with Dan Plesch, an exhaustive work (Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights) on the role of women at the UN, we learn that from the first meetings of the United Nations in 1945 for the adoption of the UN Charter and in 1948 for the adoption of the Declaration, it was these women ( from the South, mainly) who led the battle so that the position of women and feminists (las feministas of Latin America) is heard and taken into account in the Charter and the Declaration.
“Counter-narrative”
I discovered this “counter-narrative” this year, as Professor Adami points out, while pursuing graduate studies on the origin of the right to equality between the sexes in Canadian law. I therefore looked at the first international human rights instruments and documents such as the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration in order to understand how, in 1945 and 1948, the UN was already enshrining in these two tools equality between women and men, the rights of all humans and not just the rights of men.
I thought I could credit the presence of the word “woman”, the concepts of equality between women and men or the right not to be discriminated against because of one’s sex to Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the drafting committee of the Declaration. It was with surprise, but no less with great pleasure, that I learned that it is to female (and feminist) representatives from non-Western countries that we owe the early recognition of women’s right to equality ( well before Canadian domestic law) in these two founding documents of the United Nations and human rights in the world.
The Swedish researcher Rebecca Adami carried out an important research exercise in the minutes of the UN bodies (and other archives) from the San Francisco conference and wanted to make known and recognized the work of these women from the South, first in an article entitled Counter Narrative.
Adami tells us that it was three delegates from the South who carried the torch of equality and sometimes against women from Western countries in order to obtain that the language and the rights stated reflected the rights of women. Adami reiterates the courageous action of these women who are worth naming here: “Hansa Mehta (1897–1995), an Indian delegate and legislator active in the Indian independence movement, also a delegate to the Human Rights Commission; Begum Shaista Ikramullah (1915–2000), a Pakistani author, founder of the Pakistan Muslim Women Students Federation and delegate to the UN Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Issues; and Minerva Bernardino (1907–1998), politician and feminist, leader of women’s movements in the Dominican Republic and delegate to the United Nations Third Commission and the Commission on the Status of Women. »
Reading this recent work makes evident the gap in the narrative of the history of the Declaration by the absence of the reminder of the unequaled role of these women of the South for our rights, women of today. Had it not been for these three women, but also Bertha Luz, the Brazilian delegate in 1945, the word “woman” would not appear in these two documents.
From 1945, Mme Roosevelt and another American delegate opposed the idea of including the gender equality clause and argued that the word “man” included women (!). Bertha Luz, in a speech (see once again Rebecca Adami) to her peers, recalled that everywhere in the world since the Magna Carta, the men had fought for their rights to be recognized. If many say that women are included in the word “man”, we must see that women are still prohibited from participating in public life.
Without these women from the (global!) South, there would not be the concept and legal norm of equality between women in the United Nations Charter and in the Universal Declaration, and probably in the other legal instruments that have follow up. There would be no recognition of the full participation of women in UN bodies either!
These women imposed by vote the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN, imposed that the first article of the Declaration designate the subject of law “all human beings”, instead of “all “men”, they required that there be no discrimination on the basis of sex in Article 2. Ikramullah, the delegate from Pakistan, fought forcefully for the adoption of Article 16 of the declaration which affirms that marriage can only be consecrated with the full consent of both spouses and that gender equality in marriage is the norm.
These facts prompt reflection on the (false) belief that the Universal Declaration is a story about white men with white men’s rights. On the contrary, it is time to recognize that the international right of women to equality is totally due to its women of the South, clairvoyant, courageous, who were not afraid to disturb these gentlemen and their allies and who today benefit to everyone!