Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Linde Lindkvist

Excerpt

As part of Cambridge’s Human Rights in History series, Linde Lindkvist’s book Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explores the making of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which is largely construed as the most influential statement on religious freedom in human history. Delving deep into an analysis of the historical origins of its ideals and conventions, Lindkvist examines not only the context behind its framework but the writings of the protagonists – Charles Malik, O. Frederick Nolde, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rene Cassin – who played a key role in spelling it out. This work goes beyond the established view, according to which Article 18 as a joint response to the atrocities of World War II, and attempts to highlight the influence of its makers’ political visions and projects in shaping it. Motivated by lack of sufficient scholarly engagement with the making of Article 18, Lindkvist’s work is a departure from previous scholarly literature in this field, which has either taken religious freedom in Article 18 for granted or has remained agnostic on the logic behind its inclusion. He aims to better understand the motivations of “the framers to articulate this right in a [specific] way” (7). …