Roosevelt Vs Lemkin
Lemkin and Roosevelt
Kevin Santos
Kean University
After the horrendous violations of human rights during the Second World War, the reformed United Nations instituted a human rights commission, with Eleanor Roosevelt as one of its members. What she contributed to our nation and the world in general may be overlooked as many of her accomplishments go unnoticed, hidden in the shadow of her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eleanor was appointed chairwoman of the committee that came to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The U.N (post WWII) sponsored the deceleration after pressure from Latin America and other smaller countries that wanted a solid definition of human rights to be made in the United Nations Charter. Mary Ann Glendon states that her most valuable contribution to the committee was urging the installation of a nonbinding code defining human rights (as cited in Fromkin, 2001). She also deduced from the history of her own country that progress and improvement would come slowly, and was under no illusion …show more content…
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide would not have come to be without Lemkin himself. As a matter of fact, Lemkin was the person to coin the term “genocide,” as the world did not previously have a name for the actions occurring during WWII. Adopted in 1948 (the same year as Roosevelt’s document), the CPPCG implemented a standard of which the U.N would enforce to counteract genocidal crimes. When Lemkin coined the term, he referred back to the massacres in Alegeria during 1915. He used these events to illustrate what Genocide consisted of in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Shabas, n.d., para. 2, 3,
Kevin Santos
Kean University
After the horrendous violations of human rights during the Second World War, the reformed United Nations instituted a human rights commission, with Eleanor Roosevelt as one of its members. What she contributed to our nation and the world in general may be overlooked as many of her accomplishments go unnoticed, hidden in the shadow of her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eleanor was appointed chairwoman of the committee that came to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The U.N (post WWII) sponsored the deceleration after pressure from Latin America and other smaller countries that wanted a solid definition of human rights to be made in the United Nations Charter. Mary Ann Glendon states that her most valuable contribution to the committee was urging the installation of a nonbinding code defining human rights (as cited in Fromkin, 2001). She also deduced from the history of her own country that progress and improvement would come slowly, and was under no illusion …show more content…
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide would not have come to be without Lemkin himself. As a matter of fact, Lemkin was the person to coin the term “genocide,” as the world did not previously have a name for the actions occurring during WWII. Adopted in 1948 (the same year as Roosevelt’s document), the CPPCG implemented a standard of which the U.N would enforce to counteract genocidal crimes. When Lemkin coined the term, he referred back to the massacres in Alegeria during 1915. He used these events to illustrate what Genocide consisted of in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Shabas, n.d., para. 2, 3,