ABSTRACT
The Russians, want to concentrate at Belgrade on the promotion of trade relations and transfers of technology—anything, in fact, but human rights. What the United States, which has made human rights a major issue, and the other Western nations will do is uncertain. Human rights, as an idea, as an issue in religious, political, and moral philosophy, has an ancient and illustrious pedigree; the differences between the empirical and the normative foundations of human rights, between moral rights and legal rights, between group rights and individual rights—each of these topics has been the occasion of substantial intellectual disquisition. Though the Covenant of the League of Nations did not address itself to the issue of human rights but rather to the pacific settlement of disputes, a new approach manifested itself in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, the Declaration of the United Nations the year after, and in countless speeches of wartime leaders.
