ABSTRACT
The 1940s proponents of a United Nations Commission on Human Rights sought to improve on a framework of pre-war international law and organization that proved unable to prevent the Nazi holocaust. This chapter describes the Commission's precursors, founders, origins, and initial mandate. Centuries of Western reforms advancing individual rights at the national level preceded the first international human rights initiatives. The English Magna Carta and Bill of Rights, the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen all contributed to the Western tradition of individual civil and political rights. The 1919 Versailles Treaty concluding World War I created the first permanent mechanisms for international supervision of human rights violations. A series of postwar "minorities treaties" provided comprehensive human rights norms and supervisory machinery in states separated from the German and Ottoman Empire—Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.
