Drafting History - Overview - Plenary Session of the Third General Assembly Session [10]
The last stage was the debate in the Plenary Session of the Third General Assembly, which led to the adoption of the Declaration the same day, on December 10, 1948. This was the fourth time the rest of the UN membership could seek to amend what the eighteen-member Commission had done. Both the General Assembly and the Third Committee met in Paris that year. While numerous amendments were proposed, only one substantive change was made. About half of the time was spent on explanations of the abstentions. The other half was taken up with self-congratulatory speeches about what the delegates felt they had achieved. Naturally they were proud of the inclusiveness of the drafting process. The delegates were tempted to move from that inclusive process to the claim that the product therefore had worldwide applicability. The Third General Assembly adopted the Declaration just before midnight on December 10, 1948 with a vote of 48 to zero and eight abstentions. The abstentions came from the USSR, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UKSSR), the BSSR, Yugoslavia, Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. It is important to note that none of these countries voted against the Declaration and that even these abstaining delegations had participated and cooperated in the various drafting procedures. The Six Communist Abstentions The Communist abstentions coalesced around the view that the Declaration did not go far enough. They had repeatedly made the point that to protect human rights adequately, the Declaration needed explicitly to condemn fascism and Nazism. Since it did not do that, they would abstain from the vote. The deep animosity that exists between Marxist egalitarianism and Nazi racism led the USSR delegation to propose amendments to what became Articles 19 and 20 stating that fascists and Nazis did not have human rights to freedom of expression and association. When those amendments were rejected, the Communists, rather than abstaining, which was their custom, voted against these articles. But the speech of the head of the Soviet delegation, Andrei Vyshinsky, the prosecutor of the infamous Stalin purge trials, made another more substantive ideological criticism, which came close to questioning the whole project. He retracted most of his acceptance of human rights in a speech on the relationship between the individual and the state, at times taking a legal positivist approach to the matter of human rights. Human rights in this approach cannot be conceived outside the State, because the very concept of right and law was connected with that of the State. From a purely ideological point of view, the Communist countries probably should have voted against the UDHR, if they wanted to be consistent. However, insisting on a legal positivist interpretation of human rights would have deprived them of the ability to condemn nazism, because one needs a leverage point outside the nazist ideology. Only a conception of human rights as rights transcending existing national law could reject nazist legislation. A legal positivist view accepts all legislation - even immoral legislation - as long as it is drafted according to existing formal procedures. Human rights, on the other hand, are rights which people have, independent from and even against their own states. Thus the Communist bloc abstained. The Saudi Arabian Abstention The Saudi Arabian delegation abstained in the final vote mostly for two reasons: because of the wording of Article 16 on equal marriage rights and because of objections to the clause in Article 18 which states that everyone has the right “to change his religion or belief.” In an essay he wrote later, Cassin pointed out that the inclusion of Article 18 had not prevented other countries with Muslim populations, like Syria, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, from voting for the Declaration.(10) |