The following appeared in Volume 97, Number 2 (Spring, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has claim to be the most important, most enlightened document of the Twentieth Century. Conceived during the Second World War, and the direct offspring of the United Nations Charter, it remains one of humanity's proud achievements. The genius of the Declaration, and its significance now and for the next Century, are confirmed by its stature 50 years after its troubled birth and after 50 years of life in turbulent times.

Work on what emerged as the Declaration began in 1946 in the new-born Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, and the Declaration was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The Declaration, then, was born and grew during the early years of what came to be known as the Cold War,¹ that period of open yet contained hostility between the United States and the USSR and their respective allies, which dominated international relations and permeated human relations during more than four decades.

When the Cold War began, the document that emerged as the Universal Declaration was under active negotiation. Inevitably, inescapably, the Cold War impinged on the Declaration-on its spirit, its form, its content, on the implications of its adoption. The Cold War also shaped the subsequent history and significance of the Declaration. The Declaration came to represent major issues in the Cold War and became a weapon in the conduct of that war. Later, the Declaration partook of the consequences which the end of the Cold War (in 1988-90) brought to international relations generally.

I. Human Rights in the U.N. Charter

From President Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address in January 1941,² through the Atlantic Charter and Dumbarton Oaks, achieving respect for human rights appears as a declared war aim of the Second World War and of the "New World Order" to follow Allied victory. Promoting respect for human rights became one of the purposes of the new United Nations Organization established by the U.N. Charter, a purpose which all members pledged themselves to promote and help achieve.³ Among the organs and sub-organs of the United Nations Organization projected by the Charter were the General Assembly and its Economic and Social Council; and the Council was directed⁴ to "set up commissions in economic and social fields and for the promotion of human rights." ECOSOC set up the U.N. Human Rights Commission as one of its early actions.⁵

The U.N. Charter established that the condition of human rights-anywhere, everywhere-was a matter of international concern and a new and appropriate subject of international law. To the disappointment of many, however, the Charter did not append a bill of human rights. The Charter did not include clear, explicit, legal undertakings by its members to respect and ensure human rights, or any particular human right; it did not enumerate or define the human rights which the United Nations recognized and was to promote. The Charter did not even direct that an international bill of rights be promulgated and adopted.

The reticence of the United Nations Charter in respect of human rights disappointed citizens, non-governmental organizations, and even some small states. But it is not difficult to understand, and the reasons explain also much about the "legislative history" of the Declaration that was to come. The major powers, the principal framers of the Charter, were prepared to commit themselves to establish and support an organization to maintain international peace and security; they may even have been in agreement on the desirability of promoting respect for human rights-undefined, and by undefined means. Surely, however, the Western Allies were not in agreement with Josef Stalin on any conception of human rights, or on the rights that such a conception might support. Perhaps all thought-or were prepared to assume-that human rights needed no definition: human rights were those human values violated by the ineffable crimes against humanity leading to and including the Holocaust, which were perpetrated by the Nazi leaders and condemned and punished at Nuremberg. But were the Powers all agreed that human rights included-as it did for the recently-deceased President Franklin Roosevelt- freedom of speech and religion, or freedom from want? (See note 2.)

Nor were the framers of the Charter of one mind about the proper scope of international concern and international responsibility for human rights-what forms they should take, and in what relation to the responsibility of "sovereign" states and national societies. Neither the USSR nor even the United States, and probably not the United Kingdom, or France, or Nationalist China (the other "permanent members" of the Security Council), were prepared immediately to assume binding international legal commitments to respect the human rights of their own citizens, and to subject the condition of human rights in their own countries to international scrutiny and enforcement.

The records of human rights discussions among the Allied leaders are meager and inconclusive. Some early, informal drafts designed for the Charter-to-be may have included a bill of rights, reflecting perhaps aspirations of middle-level planners for the new world order. In time, these gave way to more sober, "realistic" declarations of less-normative character; definitions of human rights became less definite; proposals for specific international undertakings became exhortations to national action and pledges of cooperation. Early, as later, difficult and controversial matters, especially among not-wholly-trusting Allies, were "solved" (or resolved) by ambiguity, or by postponing them to another time and another forum.

The Human Rights Commission, established in 1946, held its first session early in 1947. It held a second session in December 1947, and completed the draft Universal Declaration in mid-1948. The General Assembly proclaimed the Declaration on December 10, 1948. At some time during those two years the Cold War began: relations between East and West became strained; suspicion and mistrust ripened into enmity. The world became "bipolar", divided by the Iron Curtain and soon engaged in a nuclear arms race. Disagreements about human rights were not an important cause of the intensifying Cold War, but sharp ideological conflict became the hallmark of that war, and contrasting attitudes towards democracy and individual rights were deeply implicated in that conflict.

Throughout the Cold War, East and West continued to meet in United Nations bodies, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission was one forum for their confrontation. The promise-and the aim-of early deliberations in that body were something approximating a bill of rights, but the conception and the content of the eventual product were the subject of controversy throughout the process. Any willingness to accommodate or to compromise soon evaporated and largely disappeared.

The Universal Declaration was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly after two years of discussion and negotiation in diplomatic capitals, in the halls of the United Nations, in the U.N. Secretariat, and in various U.N. bodies -in the UN Commission on Human Rights, in the Economic and Social Council, the committees of the General Assembly, and in the Assembly itself. It is not obvious, however, that the burgeoning international concern with human rights during those years loomed large in the diplomatic capitals of powers and superpowers, or that the significance of the negotiations that led to the Universal Declaration was commonly recognized and appreciated on either side of the political divide. The attitudes, issues, policies, and actions of the Cold War, moreover, coincided with other attitudes, issues, policies, and actions relevant to the development of international human rights; it is not easy to disentangle and distinguish those that reflect political-or geo-political- hostility from others deriving from ideological differences that antedated the Cold War, or from domestic political concerns in both camps. Differences-between social democracy and communism; between socialism and free enterprise; between liberalism and communitarianism; between the liberal state and the welfare state-might have led to many of the differences that emerged in the development of the Universal Declaration, even had there been no Cold War. But, perhaps inescapably, the events that unleashed the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the descent of the Iron Curtain exacerbated ideological differences. And before the Declaration was concluded, there were harbingers of another important influence-the struggle to end colonialism and the emergence of the Third World-that became entangled in human rights debates and were exploited in the Cold War.

Ideological-political differences subsumed in the Cold War appeared during the course of the negotiation of the Declaration in respect of several major issues: the legitimacy and propriety of concern by the international political system, by the United Nations, by international law, with the condition of human rights within countries; forms and degrees of international "intervention" in support of human rights as invasions of domestic jurisdiction and of state "sovereignty"; the character of the instrument being drafted; the idea of human rights, its sources and its philosophical foundations; human rights as elements in and as related to "constitutionalism" and democracy; the relation of rights to duties and of individual autonomy and freedom to every state's police power and its public interest; the character and definition of particular rights, notably the freedom of expression of the press, of association; the right to property, the right to work, the state's obligations in respect of unemployment, etc. etc.

It may not be possible to relate every development in the elaboration of the Universal Declaration, and the wording of every clause in it, to ideological difference or to the intensifying Cold War. But the pursuit of a document that would command universal respect and might earn universal acceptance had to confront deep ideological differences that were sharpened by the Cold War and which made human rights an important weapon of war. Some developments during that process can be attributed to a desire, even a hope, of achieving an instrument that would be acceptable (whether or not in fact later accepted and respected) to both East and West, to developed and developing states, including the states in what was to become the Third World.

The Western Allies and representatives of smaller states shared a common ideology but were hardly identical as to detail. The United Kingdom brought to the work on the Declaration a tradition of rights for British subjects under the common law, harking back to Magna Carta. France, still recovering from the war, had a new 1946 constitution which incorporated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, as well as progressive 19th Century rights, and was represented in the Commission by powerful committed persons of intellect and spirit. The United States brought 150 years of living experience with its federal Bill of Rights and the various state bills of rights. (For purposes of comparison and influence I refer in particular to U.S. constitutional history.)

When the U.N. Commission on Human Rights began its deliberations, some thought that it should produce a text for a binding international covenant. It soon became apparent that a draft covenant would require difficult and extended negotiation. It was decided, therefore, to have the Commission prepare a draft declaration even while it began to elaborate a draft covenant. In fact, the Commission completed its Declaration within a reasonably short time; the elaboration of a draft for a binding covenant had to wait, and waited for years. (Draft covenants were not completed and approved by the U.N. General Assembly until 1966, 18 years after the Declaration.) The fact that the first instrument was to be non-binding-only a declaration-and that an additional, binding instrument was also to be prepared, made it less difficult to negotiate and complete the Declaration.

The instrument produced by the Human Rights Commission and approved by the General Assembly was denominated "universal", not "international". That the Declaration was universal may have suggested that it was addressed to every state and society, directly, separately. It was not "international"; it did not require any cooperation, negotiation, or agreement among states. As the operative language of the Declaration asserts, the instrument was primarily for internal domestic use and implementation:

The General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Every society was urged to commit itself to the principles declared, to incorporate them into its national, constitutional, and political life and culture, to respect them and to take measures to ensure that they are respected. If the Declaration was to acquire also international character, it would require international action, as by steps to convert the Declaration into an international covenant.

The universal (as distinguished from international) character of the instrument is related to a second characteristic: it is a declaration, not a convention; it is not a legally binding agreement among states. If, in time, the Declaration acquired legal character, it did so by absorption into that mysterious process by which the acts ("practice") of states are transmuted into binding customary international law.

The non-binding, "non-international" character of the Declaration owes something to the Cold War, but perhaps not too much. The Soviet Union repeatedly made clear its view that human rights were an internal affair, and that significant international involvement in human rights would constitute an impermissible intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. But the United States too-although it did not object to U.N. involvement in human rights in principle, in rhetoric, in exhortation-resisted assuming international human rights obligations. Hence it too strongly preferred pursuing a declaration rather than a covenant, a document that spoke to states hortatively rather than in normative terms.

The character of the instrument being prepared- whether it was to be a declaration or a draft binding legal agreement-was debated, but it was not an issue between the United States and the USSR. Neither was eager or ready to move to elaborate a binding treaty governing how a state will treat its own inhabitants. The less-than-normative character of the Declaration, then, cannot be "blamed" on the Cold War. Such a less-than-normative instrument was however more congenial to the West than to the East, which found even such lesser international involvement unacceptably intrusive.

Even if the Declaration was to be only a nonbinding agreement, ideological and political differences emerged in drafting the text, differences that later carried over to trouble the negotiation of the other instruments, the draft Human Rights Covenants. A state is not legally bound to heed a declaration, but it might be pressed to do so; in any event, it might be judged adversely if its behavior fell far short of what was provided in a declaration approved by the U.N. General Assembly and widely respected by states generally. (In fact, the Declaration was to serve, and did serve, as a model for the Covenants that followed, and ideological differences as to the rights recognized in the Declaration appeared in the negotiation of the Covenants as well.)

The draft Declaration that emerged skirts differences as to the "source," the philosophical foundations and justifications of human rights. For the United States, the United Kingdom, and France-and for others culturally descendant from West-European ideas-rights were taken for granted, self-evident, and needed no justification. For John Locke and the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, and for Thomas Jefferson, rights were natural, rooted in natural law. By contrast, for the Soviet Union and those who shared its ideology, there could be no "natural rights"; rights did not exist unless a state conferred them by its own law. The idea of inherent inalienable rights, then, was alien to Communist ideology. But it was not essential for the Communist World to deny them in principle; and, in fact, the USSR had accepted "crimes against humanity" in the Nuremberg Charter, as well as references to "human rights" (undefined) in the UN Charter. Also, of course, unlike the American Declaration of Independence, which declared that men are endowed with rights by their Creator, there could be no mention of, or allusion to, the Creator, if the document was to obtain the consent of Communist or other atheistic governments. The Universal Declaration declares rights to be "inherent," which might mean only that they are accepted as inherent in being human. (Jeffersonian rights were also "inalienable," but no comparable idea appears in the Universal Declaration, unless it is implied in that rights are "inherent.")

In the end, the Declaration did not confer rights: it "recognized" them, sought to promote understanding of them and respect for them by states, through their own constitutions and laws.⁶ For Jefferson and Locke, rights have a source but no teleology, no purpose: they are a given. In the Universal Declaration, rights are not a "given"; they are declared by contemporary spokesmen for contemporary mankind (and perhaps for future generations) for a purpose: to realize agreed values. Rights in the Universal Declaration derive from and are essential to "human dignity," a concept vague enough to raise few issues, ideological or political. The purpose of recognizing rights is to promote other agreed values: recognition of rights "is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace." "Peace" and "justice," undefined, were accepted as universal values. And the declared relation of human rights to peace warranted sponsorship of the Declaration by the United Nations, since maintaining peace was its raison d'être, and muted, somewhat, objections that the United Nations was invading the domestic jurisdiction of states (contrary to article 2(7) of the U.N. Charter). Soviet spokesmen repeatedly warned against international transgression into the domestic domain; the United States was less insistent in principle, but it too was cautious in fact.

While the Cold War did not influence the catalogue of rights declared, in their general outlines, ideological and political influences might be discerned in specific detail. A major ideological difference might have been expected as to whether the Declaration should call on states to recognize only "negative" rights (what soon came to be called "civil and political rights"), or also "positive" rights, so-called "economic and social rights", the entitlements of the welfare state, i.e., rights to social security, work, education, a decent standard of living, housing, health care.

The United Kingdom and France, committed welfare states, found it easy to recognize economic and social rights. On the other hand, the United States, in particular, might have been expected to resist a declaration recognizing economic and social rights as human rights, since in the United States, generally, only civil and political rights have enjoyed constitutional protection (though some economic and social rights, e.g., the right to choose one's work, are protected as within the safeguarded liberty, and the right to join a trade union as an aspect of the right of association). On the other hand, socialist and welfare states strongly favored recognition of economic and social rights, including the right to work and protection against unemployment.

In fact, the United States too did not resist recognizing economic and social rights as human rights. Most of the economic and social rights recognized in the Universal Declaration are not constitutional rights in the United States, but the Universal Declaration does not demand that states give the rights it recognizes constitutional status. By successive legislation beginning with the New Deal, Congress had made the United States a welfare state. President Franklin Roosevelt had treated freedom from want as one of the Four Freedoms which he proclaimed in 1941 and which achieved status as "war aims" to be realized after Allied victory in the Second World War. (See note 2 above.) Roosevelt's State of the Union message in 1944 proposed an economic bill of rights that prefigured the welfare provisions of the Universal Declaration. The economic and social rights declared by the Universal Declaration went beyond the entitlements provided at that time in federal or state law, but some welfare benefits had begun to appear in employment contracts or to be provided by private insurance. More were to appear before long in President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program.⁷ Later, President Carter signed the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and sent it to the U.S. Senate for its consent. Recognizing economic and social rights as rights may imply a societal, if not a constitutional or even legislative commitment, and perhaps a commitment by the state to serve as their ultimate "guarantor". Resistance to recognizing economic and social rights as rights did not infect U.S. policy until the Reagan-Bush era.

For their part, the members of the Soviet Bloc did not bridle at the catalogue of civil and political rights generally. Communist ideology did not deny the sovereignty of the people or universal suffrage. "Socialist legality" could be said to satisfy the principles of justice reflected in the Declaration at least as well as did Western legal systems. In the end, the Declaration included the civil and political rights of liberal democracy familiar in the West, as well as the welfare rights of the welfare state (whether socialist or social democrat).

Differences, political or ideological, surface-or lie beneath the surface-in the articulation of particular rights. The knowledgeable U.S. reader of the Declaration would recognize in its provisions the rights protected by the United States Constitution, by the Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments as they were later interpreted and developed by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, for example, the U.S. Constitution does not expressly declare the presumption of innocence, or the requirement that criminal guilt be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, but the U.S. Constitution has been construed to include them as rights of a person accused of crime.⁸ The United States, and other states, West or East, did not object to recognizing them explicitly in the Universal Declaration as human rights.

Ideological differences surfaced but did not prevent strong, general commitment to principles of equality. The Socialist World has prided itself on its commitment to universal equality. The U.S. commitment to equality is not on the face of the Constitution. The American Declaration of Independence had declared equality of rights: "all men are created equal and they are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights"; the Constitution, however, did not include general recognition of "inalienable" rights. And equality in rights, and the equal protection of the laws, were not on the face of the Constitution even as amended by the Bill of Rights. Later amendments, however, and subsequent constitutional interpretations, established that rights are enjoyed equally by all, and that all are entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Again, the Universal Declaration declares such equality expressly.

Similarly, while the U.S. Constitution expressly prohibits coerced confession as part of the privilege against self-incrimination (Amendment V), and torture if used as punishment (Amendment VIII), the Universal Declaration declares that no one shall be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 5). And, in general, the Declaration makes explicit rights and safeguards that have been derived from the concept of "due process of law" broadly interpreted. And, in general, the Declaration makes explicit rights and safeguards that have been derived from the concept of "due process of law" broadly interpreted.

The Universal Declaration seems to declare rights which few, if any, states-Western or Socialist-were prepared to recognize, such as the right to asylum (Article 14), though what the Declaration recognizes may be a sad joke. As commonly interpreted, a refugee has a right to seek asylum and to enjoy it if granted; few states recognize an obligation to grant asylum, though a right to asylum appears in the constitution of France, and a right to asylum for victims of Fascist repression appeared in Soviet constitutions.

Ideological differences, I believe, are clear in the articulation of particular clauses, notably in respect of the right to property (Article 17) and the right to work (Article 23). To the West, the right to own property was a fundamental right. It included the right to acquire property by labor or contract (or by inheritance), and property can be taken only for public use and only if just compensation was provided. In the West, the right to property applied to one's tooth brush as well as to one's factory. Implicit in this right was considerable freedom of enterprise to acquire property. The Socialist ideology did not preclude personal property but did not commit to private property for economic use. In the end, Article 17 avoids most of the issue. It provides:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Property is not defined. No one may be deprived of it "arbitrarily", but "arbitrarily" is not defined either.

The right to work also evoked sharp differences. To the West the right meant the freedom to choose one's work, perhaps also the freedom not to work if a person did not wish to; the state was obliged not to interfere with that freedom. In the West, the right to work created no obligation on society to address unemployment, to create jobs or employment opportunities. To the Soviet spokesmen, the state could demand that a person work. ("He who does not work, neither shall he eat.") But the state also had an obligation to provide employment, and to prevent unemployment. Article 23 of the Declaration hides those differences. It declares that every person has a right to work. To the Western world that right meant a freedom to choose one's work; to the Socialist world it meant that the state is obligated to provide work.

Innocent clauses which now seem natural, even inevitable and as going without saying, in fact reflected compromise and accommodation. A sweeping non-discrimination clause explicitly bars discrimination on grounds of race and color, but also of religion. A significant term appears in several provisions, reflecting a "Soviet" defeat and a "Western" victory. Consistently with its insistence that rights are only conferred by states and are subject to domestic law, the Soviet Union sought to have rights protected only against illegal actions. Thus, no one shall be subject to arrest, detention and exile that is illegal, contrary to law, imposed without due process of law. But the final draft protects not only against illegality but against arbitrary arrest, detention or exile (Article 9). Similarly, Article 13 recognizes a right not to be subjected to interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, not only when such interference is contrary to domestic law, but also when it is arbitrary. At various stages in the various bodies through which the Declaration passed, additional issues emerged which found the United States and the USSR on opposite sides. The Soviet Union succeeded in eliminating a right of victims of human rights violations to petition the United Nations. There was no agreement on a provision for the protection of minorities. The USSR and some smaller states sought to strike blows for self-determination and against colonialism; the United States supported its Western allies in warding off such blows, reducing them to safeguards for the human rights of individuals in colonial territories.

The Soviet Union sought to make duties central and primary. In its view, duties come first, and rights have to be earned by faithful performance of duties. The prevailing majority insisted that the Declaration was a declaration of rights. Duties were a citizen's obligation, and may sometimes limit rights but even such limitations on rights were limited. Thus:

Article 29

1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

In the end, 40 states voted to proclaim the Declaration, no state voted against it. But eight states, including the USSR and its allies, abstained. As late as June 1948, the Soviet member of the Commission had declared the draft Declaration to be "absolutely unsatisfactory...unrealistic, of a formal and legalistic nature." Earlier, the Ukrainian member had withdrawn from a working group engaged in elaborating and in negotiating the draft Declaration.

The USSR continued to voice and vote its objections and its differences in the aftermath of the Declaration. It reopened most of them in the negotiation of the Covenants that derived from Declaration, and in the various U.N. bodies that addressed human rights in the following decades. The influence of the Declaration was, of course, poisoned by the Korean War. But the Universal Declaration acquired importance because it filled a gap during the 18 years required to conclude the Covenants. (Indeed, the Declaration occupied the field for 10 years more, until the Covenants came into effect.) And the Declaration remained the voice of human rights thereafter for states that did not ratify the Covenants, such as South Africa during apartheid, and the Declaration loomed large after the United States, in 1954, announced that it would not ratify the Covenants. The increasing prestige of the Declaration contributed to the fact that when the Covenants were completed they were adopted by unanimous vote. And, in course, the Third World insulated the Declaration as well as the Covenants from the rigors of the Cold War.

The Universal Declaration was prominent in the ebb and flow of the Cold War, in tension and détente. Notably, the 1970's saw the Helsinki accords: in exchange for political undertakings the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe made important human rights commitments. Among them was a commitment that:

In the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the participating States will act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They will also fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field, including inter alia the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which they may be bound.

The Universal Declaration became and continued to be a touchstone of the condition of East-West relations throughout the Cold War. As the Cold War thawed and gave way, the Universal Declaration was reaffirmed, in terms and in fact, in far-reaching declarations at Vienna and in Paris (1989), Copenhagen (1990), Moscow (1991), Geneva (1992).

There is a less fortunate coda to any discussion of the relationship between the Cold War and the Universal Declaration. A few years after the Cold War ended, some of its influence on international human rights-including the desire to appear committed to its principles, and some restraints on violation of human rights-were dissipated. If, after the end of the Cold War, it remains unacceptable to question the idea of human rights, it became acceptable and useful in the world order of the 1990s to question its universality. In 1993 China and some other Asian countries launched (or revived) "cultural relativism," suggesting that human rights have to be interpreted and applied in cultural context. They also revived "sovereignty" as a basis for challenging international concern with human rights in forms they considered intrusive. One Prime Minister even suggested that the Universal Declaration was out of date and should be reexamined and amended. But no particular deficiencies, no particular amendments were suggested, and few have rallied to that attack. The Secretary General of the United Nations seized an occasion to insist on its universality.

The Universal Declaration remains a pillar of friendly relations. The normative character of many of its provisions has grown and has been established. Perhaps remarkably, the Universal Declaration has remained intact, even sacrosanct. There have been no serious efforts to reopen it, or even to supplement it, even to remove or clarify some of the ambiguities, and fill some of its lacunae-not even to add rights of private enterprise, individual autonomy, or a more powerful commitment to democracy.

As the millennium approaches, the Declaration continues to maintain its claim to be the most important, most enlightened, instrument of the century.

Notes

1. The Cold War was not "declared" and had no official or precise beginning, but by common account it began at some time during 1946, and achieved intensity and earned recognition and its denomination as "war" with the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948.

2. Message to Congress of Jan. 6, 1941, 87 Cong. Rec. 44, 46-47 (1941).

3. Preamble and Articles 55, 56.

4. U.N. Charter, Article 68.

5. ECOSOC. Res.V(1), Feb. 16, 1946.

6. See quotation of the General Assembly's proclamation about the Universal Declaration in Section III above.

7. 90 Cong. Rec. 78th Cong.2d sess., 55-57.

8. In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970).

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