ABSTRACT
“We stand today,” Eleanor Roosevelt proclaimed to the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations on December 9, 1948, “at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind, that is the approval by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights …” 1 Roosevelt, who had played a crucial role in the production of this historic, sweeping document, proceeded to draw hopeful analogies between the impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and that of other rights documents, stretching from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Yet if the UDHR was, to some extent, part of a lineage in continuity with earlier “rights” documents, it went well beyond them in both scope and content. 2 In particular, it boldly proclaimed fundamental human rights to social and economic goods like healthcare.
