If we asked you, right now, to list off some basic human rights, what would you say? Maybe you’d start with the classics: food, water, and shelter. Maybe your mind would gravitate to warfare; we all have a human right to be safe and secure from tyranny, genocide, and the accordingly labeled “crimes against humanity.” Maybe you’d think of how people should be treated by others on a daily basis; freedom from discrimination, be it racism, homophobia, or other bigotries, is a human right.
But…what is a “human right,” exactly? Who decided that “human rights” should exist, and when? It’s one of those concepts that sounds so intuitive that it’s hard to believe that, until relatively recently, “human rights” weren’t even an intelligible category. They are a construct that, like money and marriage, had to be invented before we could take their existence for granted.
And so, in this article, let’s break down where we get our modern understanding of “human rights.” Surprisingly, they weren’t even the product of an enlightened time period, like (to be brusque) the Enlightenment. In fact, “human rights” as we know them largely originated with one document, one declaration, written fewer than 80 years ago.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the name of the document in question, was written in the aftermath of World War II by the United Nations’s Human Rights Commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Why was the UDHR created? During the war, Nazi Germany committed so many atrocities that the victorious Allies felt obligated to clarify, with specificity, the rights they had defined in the original UN charter. The UDHR doesn’t hide such aspirations; in the wake of such “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,” the declaration commits its signatories to a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.”
Nor was the UDHR created from thin air; its influences included the UN charter itself, Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime “Four Freedoms,” and, further back, the Napoleonic Code. However, it was the first document to establish a universal set of rights that could not be abridged by race, religion, nationality, or any other differences among humanity.
But what is the declaration of human rights, exactly? What does it actually state? How is it structured, and why does it matter?
While its motivations needed little explanation at the time – “Nazi atrocities” did the trick then, as they should now – the UDHR did have the challenging task of creating a comprehensive list of universal human rights designed to prevent the horrors of World War II from resurfacing in future conflicts. But its ambitions went further.
Rather than just prohibit certain crimes against humanity, the UDHR also set forth a set of ideals for how all citizens of the world should be treated by governments, protected from violence, and empowered to succeed in life. The concept of “human rights” became foundational to international law and ignited debates about what constitutes a “right” versus an “ideal” in the first place. While that debate continues today, it did not prevent the UDHR from passing in 1948 with overwhelming support from then-member nations.
There are 30 human rights spelled out in the UDHR, each with its own article and encompassing several categories of justice. If that sounds like a lot, just remember what we’ve already said: that the whole point of the UDHR was to elaborate upon the concept of “human rights” beyond vague platitudes. Hence, the document’s first article, which declares human beings “free and equal in dignity and rights,” is still important! But its framers argued that such language wasn’t enough to prevent future suffering. That’s why, from there, the UDHR spans across manifold forms of human liberation, from prohibiting slavery to guaranteeing everyone the right to a nationality to the right to own property. The rights to a fair justice system – presumed innocence, no arbitrary detention, no cruel and unusual punishment – are clearly stated. The list (literally) goes on from there.
Besides these freedoms, several of the UDHR’s provisions concern one right in particular: education. If you’re a college student, its tenets lie at the core of your academic goals. Let’s discuss them.
Education is one of the most empowering forces in human society; being able to acquire knowledge, learn skills, and achieve literacy are essential to protecting political freedom and promoting social mobility. So it’s no wonder that the UDHR enshrines the right to an education, even free education in some stages, as fundamental to the “full development of the human personality.”
If you’re a college student, you probably experience stress and anxiety while pursuing your degree. But just think about how limited your career options would be without access to a quality education. Would you be stuck doing menial labor to make ends meet? What if you didn’t have books or computers to guide your studies? If you were illiterate, how could you possibly break into any professional field? These hypotheticals alone should be enough to evoke gratitude for good education and belief in its ability to reach your academic goals.
The UDHR contains no shortage of injustices from which humans should be protected. However, it also concludes that the absence of injustice isn’t enough to maximize human liberty. Throughout the declaration, “negative freedoms,” like the right not to be held in slavery, are stated alongside “positive freedoms,” which bestow upon humans the wherewithal to reach their full potential.
Think back to Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which partially inspired the UDHR shortly after their articulation. Two of them are positive: “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship.” The other two are negative: “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” See the difference?
The right to education is one of these positive freedoms. Sure, an uneducated person is not directly, technically, being oppressed. However, they are clearly being inhibited from achieving personal success and participating fully in their society. College students often think of academia in terms of its “opportunities,” but they should also understand that those opportunities, collectively viewed, constitute a fundamental human right.
The UDHR begins its section on education with a simple and obvious assertion: “Everyone has the right to education.” However, it actually goes much further than that.
Think about positive freedoms again. Is it transparently oppressive to have to pay for basic schooling? Probably not. However, does having to pay for school create a barrier to entry that will, naturally, exclude some people from accessing education? Yes.
That’s why the UDHR qualifies, in saying that education is a right, that the “fundamental stages” of education should also be free and compulsory. Once students advance to technical and professional training, they should also have equal access to higher education. Furthermore, the UDHR acknowledges parental rights as well; students should receive education, but parents should be able to choose the “kind” that they receive.
With these details listed, the UDHR states its hope that education will not just advance personal development; an educated humanity will promote global tolerance, friendship, and peace.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while not legally binding, has become a foundational text in international human rights law since it was originally passed in 1948. It’s not the field’s only reference point; other documents, like the Geneva Conventions, have outlined in more detail the rights of prisoners, refugees, and other vulnerable groups. However, the UDHR provides the language, values, and universalistic attitude on which countless treaties, national constitutions, and international laws are based today.
Such a legacy is important to mention because, without it, Eleanor Roosevelt’s qualification that the UDHR “is not and does not purport to be a statement of law” risks coming off as ineffectual and naïve. After all, the main weakness of international law is that countries have to agree to follow it. Nevertheless, it should be a testament to the post-war spirit of collaboration that the UDHR, without any enforcement mechanism attached, remains so influential throughout the world today.
On that note, let’s dive into why the UDHR is still important to students who advocate for justice on human rights issues. Many students become involved in activism once they get to college, and academic environments often serve as fantastic platforms from which to promote ample honorable causes. Such causes are always better served when they’re grounded in historical context and are described in language that promotes different aspects of human liberty. In other words, when students familiarize themselves with the values enshrined in the UDHR, they become more knowledgeable about the rights to which they’re entitled and strengthen their activism at the same time.
One of the challenges of college activism is convincing everyone else to care about your causes. To you, supporting humanitarian work in one country may seem like an obvious obligation; to others, it’s a commitment that they just can’t balance with their daily responsibilities (or other activist work). Unfortunately, not everyone can devote their time to every cause.
So reaching people is half the battle. Fortunately, the UDHR rights we’ve been discussing are universal by design; their language is the closest thing humans can get to a consensus on what’s essential to everyone. (It’s literally in the name “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” after all.) Human rights are therefore important not just because of history, the worst horrors of which prompted peacemakers to follow up calls for “never again” with action. They’re also important for college students who are discovering how to put into words what matters to them and what, they believe, should matter to those around them too.
Part of the UDHR’s legacy is that we’ve developed more finely attuned notions of what humans deserve by virtue of being human. The document doesn’t just wax poetic about equality; it makes an actual declaration of human rights summary values with specifics attached. The right to a union is enshrined, as is the right to security in the face of unemployment, widowhood, disability, and other factors that inhibit regular employment. Even paid holidays make an appearance in Article 24, which defends the right to “rest and leisure.”
Why does this matter to college students? Because it adds legitimacy to their activism even when they’re not protesting the worst possible crimes. The UDHR is a roadmap of key liberties that all humans need to pursue happiness, and students who learn it automatically become well on their way to understanding the core tenets of international human rights law. Aspiring activists would do well, when wielding academic platforms, to cite it.
Let’s conclude, on a related note, by going beyond the UDHR and assessing the importance of human rights provisions for any significant document.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish whether an authoritarian ruler or government, even while “bad,” are actually violating international law. Imagine you’re a lawyer prosecuting a case. It’s not enough to call the defendant a “bad person.” When asked by a judge, you need to be able to point to their specific crimes. In the same way, student activists should understand that human rights advocacy necessitates a strong foundation in human rights law.
Not that activists need to go to law school, honorable as it is. Students already show legitimacy when they can identify one country’s conduct during wartime as breaching the Geneva Conventions, for example, or another country’s treatment of prisoners as violating the UN Convention Against Torture. In other words, when the UDHR speaks of the right to education, it implicitly acknowledges that knowledge is power. We believe college students should take that sentiment seriously.
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