Complicating the Universality of Human Rights

About This Lesson

Because of the text complexity and the understanding students need to have of global politics at the outbreak of the Cold War, this lesson is most appropriate for students in grades 11 and 12. If you are teaching younger students, you can skip ahead to the next lesson, Making Rights Universal. 

In the last lesson, students learned about the process by which representatives from nine countries, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights, drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The document was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Over the course of almost three years of sometimes contentious negotiations, representatives from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East (most of Africa was still ruled by colonial powers) debated not only cultural issues but politics as they tried to find common ground. 

In this lesson, students will consider the challenges that Roosevelt and members of the commission faced in enumerating the rights of every person on this planet. To understand the tensions that emerged between nations with different cultures, values, and systems of beliefs, students will examine a range of perspectives that the commission took into account when drafting the UDHR and will then consider the consequences of a world that cannot agree on universal rights for all people.

Essential Questions

• What is a right? 
• What rights should belong to every human being on earth?

Guiding Questions

• What are the challenges of creating a human rights document that represents a universal view?
• What are the potential consequences if the world cannot agree on universal rights?

Learning Objectives

• Students will identify similarities and differences between how the nations drafting the UDHR prioritized individual versus collective rights. 
• Students will reflect on the consequences of a world that cannot agree on universal human rights. 

Lesson Plan

 Activity 1: Individual versus Collective Rights

• Explain that when drafting the UDHR, the Human Rights Commission, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, began with a single question: What should take precedence, individual rights or collective needs? Asked another way, are there individual human rights that take precedence over the policies or declarations of any nation? Are there communal needs that might take precedence over the rights of an individual?
• Invite students to engage with this question, first in a journal response and then in a discussion that uses the Barometer strategy. 

Activity 2: Examine Different Perspectives on Human Rights

• Depending on students’ familiarity with the Human Rights Commission, you might share key points from this lesson’s Context section in a mini-lecture. Then let students know that they will read and reflect on different perspectives from nations, scholars, and organizations that the Human Rights Commission took into account while preparing to draft, and while drafting, the UDHR.
• Explain the Big Paper strategy. Provide students with markers and give them time to circulate silently, read, annotate, and write on each paper (see the Notes to Teachers section for details about preparing for this activity by printing the quotations in the Perspectives on Human Rights: Big Paper Quotations handout). Project the following questions for students to refer to as they interact with the quotations:
  • What rights does the speaker of each quotation emphasize—individual, collective, both, neither? How do you know?
  • What does each quotation reveal about the values held by the speaker?
  • Is it possible to create a document that represents a universal view? 

Activity 3: Discuss the Tensions between Individual and Collective Rights

Hang the papers on the board so that students can see them alongside one another. Then discuss the following questions as a class:

• Where do you see similarities across the six perspectives? Where do you see differences?
• Do you think it is ever necessary for a person to give up certain rights for the benefit of their community? What happens when one person’s individual liberties impose on those of other people in their community?

• What are the challenges of creating a human rights document that represents a universal view? What makes you say that?
• What are the potential consequences if the world cannot agree on universal rights?

Activity 4: Revisit Individual versus Collective Journal Responses

End the lesson by asking students to reread the journal responses they wrote at the beginning of the lesson. Then ask them to respond to the following question in their journals: 

• What new, different, or deeper understanding do you have about the tension that can exist between an individual’s rights and the needs of the larger community? 
• How did you come to this understanding?