Human Rights and Human Freedom:
An American View

Eleanor Roosevelt

I realize that the other delegates speak from different points of view and I understand why to them this seems different from what it does to me.

I cannot remember a political or a religious refugee being sent out of my country since the Civil War. At that time I do remember that one of my own relatives, because he came to this country and built a ship that ran contraband to the South, was not included in the amnesty. But since then this has not been a question that has entered into my thinking.

Europe has had a succession of wars and changes in population, as well as changes in ownership of land; and therefore it is natural that we approach the question from a different point of view; but we here in the United Nations are trying to frame things which will be broader in outlook, which will consider first the rights of man, which will consider what makes man more free: not governments but man.

I happen to come from the United States. I used in the committee an example: I am going to use it again; it is purely hypothetical. We happen to have an island in the Caribbean called Puerto Rico. Now in Puerto Rico there are several factions. One faction would like to become another State. Another faction would like to be entirely free. Another faction would like to stay just the way they are in their relation to the United States.

Suppose, just for the sake of supposing, that we had a refugee camp. We belong to the United Nations, but are we going to say that the Puerto Ricans, who happen to want to be free from the United States, shall receive no-letters from home, none of their home papers, no letters perhaps from people who have gone to live in other places or information from other places? I think that we can stand up under having them free to get whatever information comes their way and make up their own minds. They are free human beings.

What is propaganda? Are we so weak in the United Nations, are we as individual nations so weak that we are going to forbid human beings to say what they think and fear whatever their friends and their particular type of mind happens to believe in? Surely we can tell them, their own Governments can tell them, all we want to tell them. We are not preventing them from hearing what each country wants them to hear, but we are saying, for instance, that in the United States we have people who have come there from war-torn Europe. They are in two different camps. They will write their relatives as they hear they are in different camps in Europe and they may not always say things that are exactly polite or in agreement with the United Nations. They may even say things against the United States, but I still think it is their right to say them and it is the right of men in refugee camps and women to hear them and to make their own decisions.

I object to "no propaganda against the United Nations or any member of the United Nations." It is like saying you are always sure you are going to be right. I am not always sure my Government or my nation will be right. I hope it will be and I shall do my best to keep it as right as I can keep it, and so, I am sure, will every other nation. But there are people who are going to disagree and I think we aim to reach a point where we on whole are so right that the majority of our people will be with us and we can always stand having among us the people who do not agree, because we are sure that the right is so carefully guarded among us and the freedom of people is so carefully guarded that we will always have the majority with us.

For that reason I oppose including in a report which we have to accept, this amendment, which I consider restrictive of human rights and human freedom.

The New York Times Magazine, March 24, 1946, p. 21. From a debate between Eleanor Roosevelt and Soviet delegate Andrei Y. Vishinsky, at the UNO General Assembly.

As edited by Allida M. Black. See her collection, What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt. (Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1995)