The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The Supporting Archives

Foreword

As the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approached, I began to revise brief commentaries I had written in the early 2010s on the Articles that make up that essential document. This publication is the result of the reviewing and updating the original essays.

Originally a commentary on one Article of the Declaration was published each month in the Human Rights Working Group News of the International Council on Archives, beginning in December 2009, until all 30 Articles had been discussed. Each essay described the background of the Article, provided examples of contemporary issues related to it, and suggested archival materials that would have information on the topic. Articles that relate to a similar topic, such as the three that deal with judicial processes, by necessity meant suggesting the same archival sources. Because of the time lapse between the monthly publications, that repetition did not matter; however, as a single publication it is evident. I considered eliminating the repetition, but that would have left some of the Articles denuded of the references. Since I hope that readers who are interested in the topic of a particular Article will use the commentary as a suggestion for sources but may not look at either the entire text or that of related Articles, I ultimately decided to leave the repetition in the commentaries.

In a brief commentary is impossible to provide examples for all the issues an Article raises, both the stated issues and those that may be called “penumbras” or shadows that surround the statement. Environmental issues, gender issues, privacy issues of genetic testing results, impacts of artificial intelligence: all of these are implied by the texts of the Articles but could not have been foreseen by even the brilliant drafters of the 1948 Declaration. Readers are encouraged to think of other examples for the use of the Articles as they read the brief discussions I have included.

Trudy Huskamp Peterson
Certified Archivist

The full document can be reviewed or downloaded as a pdf.