Human Rights declaration 'wasn’t going to be much of anything', men said
Women have left an indelible mark on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but when they first started working on it, men were “thinking that the declaration wasn’t going to be much of anything”, a leading author and researcher told UN News this week.
It was the strength of women such as Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Begum Shaista Ikramullah from Pakistan, and Hansa Mehta from India that proved them wrong, said Stockholm University researcher, Rebecca Adami.
She has been studying the archives that document the early stages of the international human rights movement in general, and her book “Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” was launched on Wednesday at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York, just a few days before the 70th anniversary of the UDHR.
She started by telling Paulina Greer about the importance of the document at the time, not only for the United Nations but for the whole world.