The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On 10 December 1948 in Paris the General Assembly adopted resolution 217 A (III), thirty articles on the rights that belong to every human being and of which he cannot be deprived. Forty eight states voted in favour, none against, and eight abstained: the Soviet Union with three states of its circle, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, together with Saudi Arabia and the Union of South Africa. The Declaration bound no one to anything: it is not a treaty but a measure to which treaties were later drawn up.

Several hands wrote it, and one of them was the French jurist Rene Cassin (1887-1976), from 1945 the head of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and in 1968 a Nobel peace laureate for this work. Such was the year: the Holocaust lay three years back, the State of Israel had stood for seven months, and hundreds of thousands were still living in camps for displaced persons. The words on the right of everyone to seek asylum and on the right to a nationality were not written in a void.