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Earlier this month, I participated in a workshop on statelessness and the right to nationality at a UN conference in Paris, France. The three-day conference was an experience full of contradictions, but the event’s theme, “Reaffirming Human Rights for All: The Universal Declaration at 60,” compels one to focus wearily but ultimately on the positives. After all, human rights are as important now as they have ever been.

The official title of the conference, the 61st Annual DPI/NGO Conference, is revealing in what it does not tell you. Ironically, “DPI/NGO,” one of countless acronyms in international organization-speak, is meant to express the transparent relationship between the UN’s Department of Public Information (DPI) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The term implies that some sort of dialogue between senior UN officials and NGOs will take place at the event. Higher-ups were certainly present, but their role was limited, either appearing via videoconference or addressing large audiences with little to no opportunity to take questions.

That said, around 1,200 participants from about 90 countries came to the event and the roundtable sessions were filled over capacity. Being surrounded by individuals of so many nationalities and hearing snippets of four or five languages coming from translation headsets generated a utopian, John Lennon-y buzz. Catholic priests, Buddhist nuns, gay rights activists, sociologists, youth leaders, lawyers, and artists, among others, converged to seek affirmation for their causes. Our own statelessness panel consisted of an American, a Swede, a Serbian, and a Dominican, people from different corners of the world who had come together to discuss solutions to shared problems.

It made you feel good to think that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) “remains the most cited and most translated document in the world,” according to DPI. That might be true. Framed provisions of the Universal Declaration decorated the office of a human rights organization for which I worked in New Delhi, India. During one session, a former UN official presented from his coat pocket his miniature copy of the UDHR, printed in 1948 and signed by Eleanor Roosevelt.

But over the course of three days, the same problems we’ve heard for decades were repeated: “Political will is absent”; “Civil society is muzzled”; “the Security Council is just a talk shop”; “Why, 60 years after the Second World War, are we still unable to stop genocide?” Marek Halter, the Polish-born French novelist who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Soviet Union, asked in the closing session: “Can we truly say that man has learned his lesson? No. Men and women are neither good nor bad. They just are. That’s what Solzhenitsyn told me.” Francois Zimeray, Ambassador for Human Rights of France, observed that “The UDHR could not be passed today. No diplomat alive would dare write it.” So what is there to celebrate after 60 years of the UDHR?

The last two speakers of the closing session provided a response. The speakers were Stéphane Hessel, a 90-year-old French diplomat who had participated in the French Resistance and survived Buchenwald, and Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian-French politician who was rescued last July from Colombian rebels after six years in captivity. Their experiences fortified their simple messages that the voices of non-governmental organizations are powerful, that the courage of such groups is fundamental, and that the work for human rights remains unfinished. “There are at least 3,000 hostages still in Colombia,” Betancourt reminded the audience, “with no voice, no life, cut off.”

Bringing multiple organizations together from time to time to cogitate on where the UDHR has been and where it’s going is a healthy thing. But more importantly, Hessel’s and Betancourt’s reflections convey that NGOs are supremely relevant wherever the document is ignored. For such contexts, as Betancourt said, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is “more than a law.”

--Katherine Southwick