Declaration of Human Rights

Before the end of World War II, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) began strategizing about ways to assist vulnerable populations in the postwar world. The Committee believed that the minorities’ rights treaties that came into effect in Europe after World War I had done little to protect groups such as Jews in countries under Nazi influence. In anticipation of plans to found the United Nations organization, in December 1944, the AJC published the Declaration of Human Rights, a document signed by 1,326 American leaders, including the U.S. vice president, two Supreme Court justices, and labor leaders. The AJC then served as official consultants to the U.S. delegation at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. In calling for a global bill of rights, it anticipated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN on December 10, 1948.