Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (33 page)

From the inception of the United Nations Organization in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the U.S. president, devoted her energies to promoting the declaration of a World Charter of Human Rights, which was duly adopted in 1948. In its official French version it is called
Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme
. But one major thing had changed since the phrase
droits de l’homme
had first been monumentalized in 1789: in 1946, Frenchwomen became entitled to vote and were now citizens in the same sense (or almost the same sense) as men. The traditional use of the masculine
homme
to mean
Mensch
began to seem discriminatory. By the 1970s, French feminist campaigners were clamoring for a parallel declaration of
les droits de la femme
, even though such a thing, if it had ever been made, would most likely have excluded women from the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—which would have been counterproductive, to say the least.

The German
Menschenrechte
would have solved the problem for everybody, but German is not an official UN language.
³So it was the English adjectival formulation that was transported back into nearly all other European languages of the Germanic and Romance families—Italian
diritti umani
, Spanish
derechos humanos
, Swedish
mänskliga rättigheter
, and so on.

In French, however, the expression
droits humains
has a real problem:
humain
means, indistinctly, what we mean by human and what we mean by humane. Consequently, to call human rights
droits humains
in standard French puts them closer to humanitarian concerns, which are not the principal objects of laws on human rights.

These areas of ambiguity have led to the exclusion of the term
human rights
from many international instruments that deal with them: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1979), and the Convention Against Torture (1984) all avoid the term, and even Europe, home of the original formulation, felt the need to complement it in the title of its European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953). With the passage of time and because of the spread of the ideas that it conveyed,
human rights
slowly ceased to be a term of law. As it percolated into general use, it found itself expelled from juridical language. Which is precisely what the systematic nature of legal language would require.

This has created an awkward issue for French. The historical priority of the revolutionary decree of 1789 has made France unwilling to dispense with what it still regards as the classical, transparent formulation of the idea.

The solution found was to change the language to make the old formulation still fit for use. The word
Homme
written with an uppercase letter now refers to men and women indistinctly and is the declared exact written equivalent of the German
Mensch
; whereas
homme
with a lowercase initial letter refers only to males. Although legally enforceable, the distinction is hard for people to remember. I’ve read many newspaper articles where upper- and lowercase
homme
are used in alternation, as substitutes for each other.

Russian, on the other hand, retains even in its current constitution a form of words copied directly and somewhat unnaturally from eighteenth-century French: