Universal Declaration Of Human Rights

American leaders like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, were some of the first to champion human rights as universal notion. Their work led to the conversion of a political ideology once completely disregarded into a dominant element of international affairs today. Despite this, the United States has lagged behind in its failure to ratify most of the international human rights treaties that have come into existence since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR explicitly states the rights of all people everywhere and the United States claims to recognize these rights. Yet its actions and official statements contradict this, both domestically and internationally. The rights laid out in the UDHR – civil and political and economic, social, and cultural – were intended to be and, in fact, are interdependent. However, American influence played a large part in the separation of these rights into two separate documents. The …show more content…
Economic freedom in the United States tend to focus on autonomy and the idea that an individual’s circumstances are a result of his personal choices, which tends to result in victim blaming. This stems from the fact that the Constitution does not contain any explicit statements about ESCR. The conversation about rights as a result values individual rights and does not consider collective rights. There is nothing inherently wrong or socialist about the idea of collective rights. (Libal & Hertel, 2011)Yet conservatives continue to argue against them using trite rhetoric that does not hold to scrutiny. Take, for example, this excerpt from a Heritage Foundation report from 1993: “Ratification of this treaty could be a costly disaster. It would violate the intellectual spirit of freedom and individual liberties that has characterized America since its founding.” (Cowin,