Study the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 Flashcards on 1948, the Drafters and the Missing Articles
Deck LO7112 reviewed: 30 UDHR flashcards on the 1948 vote and its drafters, the three articles the deck skips, and two backs that need correcting.
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Deck LO7112 — Universal Declaration of Human Rights (30 cards) is a well-built history deck. It teaches how the Declaration was made — the room, the vote, the seven people who wrote it — with dates and names you can be examined on. What it barely teaches is the text itself, and that gap is easy to close.
Study this deck: Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1 / 10When was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted?
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
What the 30 cards cover
10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris; Resolution 217 A (III); the vote of 48 in favour, none against, 8 abstentions, 2 not voting; Eleanor Roosevelt as chair; John Peters Humphrey as principal drafter; René Cassin and the second draft; Charles Malik of Lebanon, P.C. Chang of China, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, Hansa Mehta of India; the Four Freedoms; the Saudi abstention over Article 18; the Soviet bloc abstention; Jan Smuts, Te Water and apartheid; the Third Committee's 81 meetings and 168 amendments; 562 translations; World Human Rights Day; the ICCPR and ICESCR; the Cairo Declaration of 2000; and the text's non-binding status as customary international law.
Seven cards to give you the flavour
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Is the UDHR legally binding on UN member states? | No, it is a declaration of principles, not a treaty, though many provisions are considered customary international law |
| Which Indian delegate changed "all men are created equal" to "all human beings are created equal"? | Hansa Mehta |
| Who inserted the word "dignity" into the UN Charter that influenced the UDHR? | Prime Minister Jan Smuts of South Africa |
| Which South African representative argued against including "dignity" in the UDHR to protect apartheid? | Charles Theodore Te Water |
| How many translations of the UDHR existed as of 2024? | 562 languages (making it the world's most translated document) |
| Which two binding UN covenants were based on the UDHR? | ICCPR and ICESCR |
| What alternative human rights document did the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation adopt in 2000? | Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam |
The three articles the deck forgets
Card 5 says the Declaration has 30 articles. Cards 11-16 map them in blocks — 1-2, 3-5, 6-11, 12-17, 18-21, 22-27 — and stop. Articles 28, 29 and 30 appear nowhere in the deck. Write them before your first review: Article 28 (a social and international order in which the rest can be realised), Article 29 (duties to the community, and the only limits allowed on these rights) and Article 30 (nothing in the text may be read as a licence to destroy the rights it grants). Article 29 is the hinge of nearly every exam question about limiting rights.
Split the block cards too: knowing that "Articles 3-5" cover life, slavery and torture never tells you which number is which — and numbers are what gets cited.
Two backs to correct
Card 17 misattributes the Four Freedoms. The back calls it "a WWII declaration by the Allies". It was a speech — Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union address of 6 January 1941, delivered to the US Congress eleven months before the United States entered the war, and it fed the Atlantic Charter afterwards.
Card 27 reverses the Soviet position. As written it reads as though the Soviet bloc emphasised negative rights over positive ones. Their complaint was the opposite: the Declaration leaned on civil and political rights and gave too little weight to socio-economic ones — alongside objections that it failed to condemn fascism and intruded on sovereignty.
Two study angles
The abstentions are scattered. Saudi Arabia is card 10, the Soviet bloc card 27, South Africa only implied by cards 24-25. Make one card listing all eight: USSR, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa — plus Honduras and Yemen, who did not vote.
Use the South African irony as a hook. Smuts put "dignity" into the UN Charter; Te Water fought to keep it out of the Declaration. Same country, three years apart.
Two terms the backs rely on are never defined: customary international law (card 9) and the International Bill of Human Rights, the umbrella covering the UDHR plus the two 1966 covenants of card 23. Hints are empty on all 30 cards.
Deck LO7112 is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app. Continue with Human Rights Treaties and Institutions and International Law, EU & Organizations.
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