When it was adopted in 1948, nobody really knew what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was going to be. Would it be world-changing? Irrelevant? The basis for a Broadway musical called Eleanor!?

Verdict: over time, the UDHR has become one of the most important documents of the modern era, but the criticisms it faced early on have followed it around since.

Let's break it down:

Opinion No. 1: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty sweet idea. In fact, it might be the grooviest document humans have ever come up with. Everyone deserves a decent, safe life free from fear or want.

Opinion No. 2: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just a bunch of words and nice ideas that you can't enforce.

It doesn't matter what part of the world you're in, you'll find people who revere the United Nations and its most famous text and and people who dismiss them.

Fuzzy Influence

Since its adoption in 1948, the UDHR has been translated into hundreds of languages, referenced in tons of other treaties and national constitutions, and inspired numerous organizations dedicated to furthering the cause of human rights around the world.

Nowadays, people use the language of human rights more than they ever have (source). Governments invoke human rights to justify their actions—and to criticize their enemies. Organizations build mission statements around human rights. Kind of like "innovation" and "transparency," "human rights" is one of those buzzwords (or, rather, phrases) that almost everybody associates with virtue.

The very fact that the declaration exists is kind of amazing in itself. The document gave people all over the world a common language of human rights.

But…

Did creating the UDHR actually improve the status of human rights worldwide? Are people more free and safe today than they were in 1948—and if so, can this really be attributed to the UDHR? Plenty of nations talk the talk, but do they walk the walk?

All Bark and No Bite

Today, and really throughout its entire history, the U.N.'s human rights arm has been criticized for the fact that it can't really do anything. More specifically, that it doesn't have the power to do anything.

During the drafting process, some U.N. representatives wanted the document to have the status of a binding treaty—an international law. That didn't happen at the time, but since 1948, several other "binding" U.N. treaties have incorporated most of the UDHR's ideas into strict international law.

But…

The difference between an international lawand a resolution like the declaration isn't really that significant—it's dependent on the ability to enforce the law. That's where critics say the United Nations often fails. Want some hair-raising examples?

• Out of the 193 member nations of the U.N., about 150 of them still engage in torture (source).
• The UDHR hasn't prevented human rights violations by its most powerful members. China and Russia, for example, are often hammered by other countries for their limitations on freedom of speech and the treatment of minorities.
• The United Nations doesn't always intervene to protect human rights. In the 1990s, the organization didn't do enough to stop genocide in Rwanda (source), one of the biggest human rights disasters of the postwar era. So much for "never again."
• The U.N. can't do anything about dictatorial regimes without using force. For example, the organization wasn't able to stop Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from dropping bombs on people in his own country, despite the U.N. secretary-general urging the Security Council to take action (source). Unless countries with powerful militaries like the United States play global cop, unscrupulous leaders can often get away with massive human rights abuses.
• The U.N.'s armed peacekeepers, soldiers who are supposed to enforce the U.N.'s missions, have been accused of various wrongdoings, including child sex abuse.

Not exactly a perfect record.

The declaration itself isn't really enforceable, and it wasn't intended to be. It's more a set of aspirations than a code of law. It even says so in the preamble, which calls the document "a common standard of achievement" (Preamble.8).

The document might be something to live by, but if people can get away with it, they don't always do what they're supposed to do. Seriously, have you ever seen Goodfellas?

Is It Really Universal?

Putting aside the question of the U.N.'s power to enforce the goals of the UDHR, there's also philosophical controversy around human rights. Can any rights really be considered "universal"?

According to one school of thought, relativism, differences in culture could make something that is a human right in one country immoral in another country.

In fact, right as the UDHR was being hammered out, the American Anthropological Association released public statements critical of the developing document. The organization stated that "standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive" (source). In other words, some of the articles in the text might be just, like, your opinion, man. To take one example, the U.S., at least certain parts of it, still thought segregated schools were just fine in 1948, and thought so until 1954. Actually, they still thought so even after the Supreme Court made that illegal.

At the time, colonialism was also a major sticking point in the debate over human rights. European countries still controlled large amounts of colonized territory in Africa and Asia. Cultural imperialists believed that Western countries were capable of governing the rest of the world and that Western values were the values that everyone should have. Not exactly a recipe for diversity.

On the other hand, the relativist argument can be a slippery slope: if one culture insists that women have to be second-class citizens, should the rest of the world really tolerate that as a cultural difference?

Nowadays, anthropologists aren't quite as pessimistic. Three-quarters of the world's countries have adopted most of the U.N.'s human rights treaties, including regions that were formerly colonized. So it's looking more and more like human rights are something that can be embraced across cultural divides.