Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris on December 10, 1948, by a vote of 48 in favor, zero against, and 8 abstentions (the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa). Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee; Canadian John Humphrey produced the first draft; French jurist Rene Cassin revised it. Article 21 declared that the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government, expressed through periodic and genuine elections. It was a near-global codification of the consent-of-the-governed principle, reached three years after the liberation of the Nazi camps.
Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee. The document is not a treaty and imposes no legal obligation — but it functions as the reference text against which every subsequent claim of legitimacy is measured.
04 · The Ballot
Consent in principle is meaningless without a mechanism. The 19th and early 20th centuries were the long, contested project of actually counting that consent — extending the vote from property-owning men to working men, to women, to racial minorities. It is a project that is, in many places, still unfinished.
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