ABSTRACT
The idea of human rights was first announced in the Atlantic Charter, an eight-point declaration issued on 14 August 1941 by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who reasserted the basic ideas of democracy and individual freedom as a shared goal among the Allies. In some sense, human rights could be seen as a self-limitation of dominant powers, just as a constitution can be perceived as the self-limitation of those who wield the power within a state. A closer look at the origins of human rights, however, reveals a more complex picture. It took 20 years to adopt two enforceable human rights covenants within the UN framework. Kenneth Roth and Joanna Weschler suggest that the purpose of the exclusive focus of the UN Commission on Human Rights on drafting human rights treaties and standards was ‘to avoid even the discussion of human rights violations in specific countries’.
