The international legal regime negotiated after World War II was the most ambitious effort in history to adopt new international legal standards for human rights. Historical circumstances – flowing from the war and from Nazi and other atrocities – were of such a nature and magnitude that for the first time governments joined in a cooperative effort under United Nations auspices to draft legal agreements to reduce the possibility of such tragedies in the future. Leaders in many parts of the developing world found that the rights framework resonated with self-determination in the project of decolonization. The Cold War encouraged leaders in both the United States and the Soviet Union to champion rights of differing kinds as a way to seize the moral high ground in their global competition for allies and adherents.

But as we have seen, the development of a successful legal regime was hardly a foregone conclusion. Chapter 2 discussed the domestic resistance within the United States to an enforceable rights regime internationally. The Soviet Union had withheld its support from the UDHR in 1948. The British took a decade to ratify the ICCPR, doing so the year it entered into force. The articulation and broad acceptance of a legal approach to international human rights was hardly assured in these years.