Appropriations of human rights in Brazil and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

Abstract

The founding of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 were fundamental to the internationalization of debate on human rights. Although harnessed at the beginning of the Cold War (at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s), the subject was never unanimously agreed upon among the UN’s members, exceeding the boundaries of the debate on international peace and security. It is thus by considering the political, economic, and ideological interests fighting for the hegemony in the international organization that this article aims to analyze the emergence of the debate on human rights, with a particular focus on the appropriation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in certain sectors of Brazilian society at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. Based on an understanding that ideas on human rights (the question of human dignity and its universality) have been and continue to be frequently cited in the defense of much more than the 30 articles in the 1948 Declaration of Rights, it seems fundamental to map the political use of such rights, investigating (as far as possible) how several legal writers and journalists on the Rio-São Paulo axis proposed ideals of society and civilization and moral values for humanity by means of an elementary defense of human rights.