ABSTRACT
What triggered the preparation and subsequent adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the initiative taken in January 1941 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then president of the United States, in his State of the Union Message to the US Congress, against the background of the Second World War and the prospects that the United States would be drawn into it. Roosevelt was deeply concerned with ways to prevent such wars from erupting in the future. These were his words:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.1
