Elements of the historical construction of human rights in the first half of the 20th century: The contributions of André Mandelstam and H. G. Wells

Abstract

This study proposes to analyze the contributions of two authors, the Russian-French jurist André Mandelstam and the English writer H. G. Wells, to the construction of human rights in the first half of the 20th century. Mandelstam was the author of one of the first texts on human rights at the international level: the Declaration of International Human Rights of 1929, within the framework of the Institut de Droit International in Paris. Wells, on the other hand, actively participated in the formation of the League of Nations as an English delegate, and in 1940 he published The rights of man, a manifesto with eleven points on fundamental rights that formed the basis for the UN declaration of 1948. The proposal is based on a bibliographical and documentary study based on the declarations and manifestos of two authors and suggests analyzing how, in its own way, it helped to promote human rights in a context in which the concept still did not have a legal and universalist meaning, and was strongly shaken by the threat of great world wars. Although these contributions to the formulation of human rights policies in the second half of the 20th century are not objectively recognized, we consider that both authors played a fundamental role in defining the concept of human rights debated in the political arrangements that allowed for the formation of the UN.