Drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, it was accepted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 during its third session on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France.

[3] The Declaration is generally considered to be a milestone document for its universalist language, which makes no reference to a particular culture, political system, or religion.

"[20] When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became fully apparent after the war, the consensus within the world community was that the UN Charter did not sufficiently define the rights to which it referred.

[27] Canadian John Peters Humphrey, the newly appointed Director of the Division of Human Rights within the United Nations Secretariat, was called upon by the UN Secretary-General to work on the project, becoming the Declaration's principal drafter.

[34] Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, an educator and judge, strongly supported the inclusion of socioeconomic rights, which had been opposed by some Western nations.

In her memoirs, Roosevelt commented on the debates and discussions that informed the UDHR, describing one such exchange during the Drafting Committee's first session in June 1947:Dr. Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality.

Dr. Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr. Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!

[31]In May 1948, roughly a year after its creation, the Drafting Committee held its second and final session, where it considered the comments and suggestions of member states and international bodies, principally the United Nations Conference on Freedom of Information, which took place the prior March and April; the Commission on the Status of Women, a body within ECOSOC that reported on the state of women's rights worldwide; and the Ninth International Conference of American States, held in Bogota, Colombia from March to May 1948, which adopted the South American-based American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, the world's first general international human rights instrument.

[44] The Council adopted Resolution 151(VII) of 26 August 1948, transmitting the draft International Declaration of Human Rights to the UN General Assembly.

[51] Eleanor Roosevelt is credited with having been instrumental in mustering support for the Declaration's adoption, both in her native U.S. and across the world, owing to her ability to appeal to different and often opposing political blocs.

It is a declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms, to be stamped with the approval of the General Assembly by formal vote of its members, and to serve as a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations.The UDHR is considered groundbreaking for providing a comprehensive and universal set of principles in a secular, apolitical document that explicitly transcends cultures, religions, legal systems, and political ideologies.

[66] Due to its inherently universalist nature, the United Nations has made a concerted effort to translate the document into as many languages as possible, in collaboration with private and public entities and individuals.

[72] In its preamble, governments commit themselves and their people to progressive measures that secure the universal and effective recognition and observance of the human rights set out in the Declaration.

[82] Other legal scholars have further argued that the Declaration constitutes jus cogens, fundamental principles of international law from which no state may deviate or derogate.

The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognized human rights.

[87] As of 2014, the constitutions that still directly cite the Declaration are those of Afghanistan, Benin, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Chad, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Niger, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Somalia, Spain, Togo, and Yemen.

[89] Nations as diverse as Antigua, Chad, Chile, Kazakhstan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Zimbabwe have derived constitutional and legal provisions from the Declaration.

[90] Likewise, research conducted in 1994 identified 94 references to the Declaration by federal and state courts across the U.S.[91] In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain that the Declaration "does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law", and that the political branches of the U.S. federal government can "scrutinize" the nation's obligations to international instruments and their enforceability.

[87] In a speech on 5 October 1995, Pope John Paul II called the Declaration "one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time", despite the Vatican never adopting it.

[96] In a statement on 10 December 2003 on behalf of the European Union, Marcello Spatafora said that the Declaration "placed human rights at the centre of the framework of principles and obligations shaping relations within the international community".

[101] Some organizations, such as the Quaker United Nations Office and the American Friends Service Committee have developed curriculum or programmes to educate young people on the UDHR.

[110][111] Pakistan, officially an Islamic state, signed the declaration and critiqued the Saudi position,[112] strongly arguing in favour of including freedom of religion as a fundamental human right of the UDHR.

For example, Iraq's representative to the United Nations, Bedia Afnan's insistence on wording that recognized gender equality resulted in Article 3 within the ICCPR and ICESCR, which, together with the UDHR, form the International Bill of Rights.

Pakistani diplomat Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah influenced the drafting of the Declaration, especially with respect to women's rights, and played a role in the preparation of the 1951 Genocide Convention.

[113] In 1982, the Iranian diplomat to the United Nations, who represented the country's newly installed Islamic republic, stated that the Declaration was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition" that could not be implemented by Muslims without conflict with sharīʿa law.

The Cairo Declaration is widely acknowledged to be a response to the UDHR, and uses similar universalist language, albeit derived solely from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).

[118]: 50–51  Sachedina further argues that many Christians similarly criticized the Declaration for allegedly reflecting a secular and liberal bias in opposition to certain religious values.

[118]: 50–51 Kazakh religious scholars Galym Zhussipbek and Zhanar Nagayeva have argued that the rejection or failed implementation of human rights in Muslim-majority countries and their seeming incompatibility with sharīʿa law originates from the current "epistemological crisis of conservative Islamic scholarship and Muslim mind", rooted in the centuries-old confinement of a role for reason within strict limits, and in the disappearance of rationalistic discursive Islamic theology (kalām) as a dynamic science from the Muslim world.

"[121] Irene Oh, director of the peace studies programme at Georgetown University, has argued that Muslim reservations towards some provisions of the UDHR, and the broader debate about the document's secular and Western bias, could be resolved through mutual dialogue grounded in comparative descriptive ethics.

[126][127] The American Anthropological Association criticized the UDHR during its drafting process, warning that its definition of universal rights reflected a Western paradigm that was unfair to non-Western nations.