There’s Still Hope for Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should not be written off as a failure*

On a February day in 2019, I found myself in a small, immaculately kept shelter in an overcrowded Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. It was home to Mohammed Salim, his wife and their four young children, and his wife’s elderly parents. They had fled genocidal violence in Myanmar and had seen family members killed in front of them. There were no foreseeable prospects of being able to return home, and the conditions in the camp were dire.

As we spoke, my eye was drawn to a faded document with curled edges, pinned to the central post holding up the blue plastic UN sheeting that shielded them from both sun and rain. It was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Mohammed clearly had every reason to see the Declaration’s thirty articles as cynical and hypocritical promises. But instead, he said that when he learned about the Universal Declaration, he “knew that it holds promise, as a lifeboat.” It was clearly his source of hope.

Hope is by no means abundant on today’s world stage. Next month marks 80 years since the founding of the United Nations. There has been much focus on the UN’s many failings, for the anniversary comes at a time when respect for international law and global institutions is disintegrating. Paralyzed by shameless vetoes by the United States, Russia and China, the Security Council has been powerless to prevent Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s punishing unlawful invasion of Ukraine, the Taliban’s decimation of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, and Sudan’s descent into catastrophic civil war. The plight of one million Rohingya refugees has been long forgotten.

No matter the urgency of UN Secretary General António Guterres’ pleas and the harrowing toll of incinerating fires and ravaging floods across the world, states fail to do what is necessary to halt the relentless advance of the climate crisis. And hate and disinformation – by no means limited to Donald Trump and his acolytes and sycophants – have fostered distrust, fear and violence that permeates all corners of society.

Amidst all of that calamity, despair and polarization, can the Universal Declaration truly be that hopeful lifeboat?

Naysayers and skeptics say that it has had 77 years to prove itself, since its adoption in 1948. It has not risen to the task, and thus we should recognize that while it was a fine idea, it cannot deliver what it promises. 

It is unfair to write the Declaration off only as failure. For there has been enormous human rights progress over those years; far greater than at any time in history. And much of that remarkable change has undeniably been spurred and inspired by the Declaration.  But that certainly does not mask the cruelty, repression and inequality that are embedded in the lives of billions of people, in every part of the world, including Canada.

So what stands in the way? The answer is simple. We have failed, utterly, to embrace the most essential element of the human rights promise; that it is universal.

It is worth sitting with that word for a moment. Universal means much more than something that is merely widespread. It stems from the Latin, universalis, meaning “belonging to all.” It is transcendent, prevailing over all else, no matter what.

That is where we have fallen so grievously short. We have not even truly acknowledged that human rights are a universal promise, let alone ensured they are universally protected and enjoyed. Instead, we have allowed human rights to become a club. Membership is steeped in white, patriarchal, moneyed privilege. At best there is second tier membership – with many or most of the benefits withheld – for women, for Indigenous, racialized and 2SLGBTQI+ communities, for people living with disabilities, and for those living in poverty. Outside the clubhouse, Islamophobic and antisemitic hate are rampant. The club’s doors remain locked to Palestinians, to trans youth, and to people living in homeless encampments.

Yet, the UN Charter – proclaimed in the name of “We the Peoples” – enshrines “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction” as one of the four main purposes of the United Nations. And the Universal Declaration opens with “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  The foundation, not the roof.  Universality is not a lofty goal beyond our reach. It is where we are meant to begin.

Universal  was a deliberate and unusual choice for the title of an international legal document. It reflected what governments knew was so necessary at a time when our world had been torn apart by six blood filled years of war and the abomination of the Holocaust.

That impulse did not come from nowhere in those postwar years. It reflects humanity’s deepest beliefs over millennia, expressed in Indigenous and religious teachings, the reflections of our greatest philosophers, and the cris de cœurs of history’s most monumental revolutions. Our guiding stars have consistently been the certainty that life is sacred, we are lifted up by our common humanity, we deserve and owe each other respect, and we crave fairness and freedom. Even when our communities, nations and our world have been subsumed by unspeakable violence, harsh repression and cruel subjugation, those yearnings have been irrepressible. Those beliefs, that certainty and those yearnings are the universal promise of human rights.

There are times when stock phrases do say it best, and thus: now more than ever. Now, more than ever, we must build on the foundation that universal human rights provide us and demand of us.

That means we must put human rights first. And we need tools to do so. Canada needs both an international human rights action plan to guide our diplomacy around the world, and a national framework for implementing those international obligations here at home.

That means we must embrace universality and commit to equality. Surely that starts with each of us taking up the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We must also, urgently, suspend the so-called “safe” third country refugee agreement with the United States, and incorporate respect for economic, social and cultural rights into our laws.

That means we must protect human rights defenders and the right to protest, around the world and across the country. They are, after all, the sentinels of human rights and the lifeblood of democracy.

That means we must ensure justice. No more silence as the International Criminal Court faces attacks for tackling atrocities in Gaza. No more use of the Charter’s notorious notwithstanding clause to shut down avenues of human rights justice.

That means we must be expansive.  It is tempting to retreat to a desperate effort to shore up existing norms and institutions as they crumble, and we of course must do so. But we must also be expansive in how we understand and approach human rights, in such areas as nature and the environment, economic justice and taxation, and the role of technology in our lives.

And finally, and above all else, we must all believe in and champion human rights. Human rights breakthroughs have always come from the people, and it begins with one person. If the lifeboat is seaworthy and accessible to all, and ready to navigate through stormy waters, change, even enormous change, is possible. That is – universally – up to us.

*Originally published as an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, September 20. 2025