Professor Glendon
HLS Professor Mary Ann Glendon, author of “A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” spoke, in a videotaped interview, at the opening of the Facing History and Ourselves Conference on Nov. 20 in the Ropes Gray Room at HLS. View video here.
On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Glendon said that the document originated with an international gathering of philosophers convened by the U. N.to draw up a list of fundamental principles. The resulting Declaration, signed by countries all over the world, “was really not about enforcement, it was about inculturation,” she said. On the Declaration’s effectiveness, Glendon noted that, since its adoption, “practically every constitution in the world that has a bill of rights is modeled or influenced in some way by that core of principles.”
Glendon, a professor at HLS, is currently the U. S. ambassador to the Holy See . In 2004, Pope John Paul II named her as president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 1995, she led the Vatican delegation to the U.N. Conference on Women, in Beijing.
The interview was produced by documentary filmmaker Rebecca Richman Cohen ’07. Cohen has worked on Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and other films, and she produced the documentary “Nuremberg Remembered,” on the legacies of the first international war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg.