THE CARNAGE OF the Second World War led to a determination by the victors to create a new and better international system. While fighting fascism, the United States, Britain and their Allies had begun serious attempts to map out how human rights might be incorporated into any future international organization. An approximate genealogy of this remarkable evolution of human rights might begin with President Roosevelt's Your freedoms’ speech, to be followed shortly afterwards by the penning of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 between Winston Churchill and FDR, before moving on to the Declaration of the United Nations on 1 January 1942 and the eventual Charter of the UN in June 1945.

En route, it could note the efforts of the likes of Sumner Welles of the US State Department and the tireless writer and broadcaster H.G. Wells, who kept insisting that a better world was needed once fascism in its Western and Eastern guises had been stamped out for good. Such voices demanded that a people's war should be rewarded by a people's peace where the promotion of rights for all deserved pride of place. In the process human rights emerged as an important war aim.

Given the heady atmosphere surrounding the establishment of the UN, there suddenly appeared to be opportunities galore for those who had previously been excluded from the conference halls. Instead of the conventional assumption that a privileged group of victors, formed exclusively of prime ministers, presidents and generalissimos with their contingents of advisers, would dictate the terms of all peace settlements, it seemed as if an assortment of nationalists, feminists, supporters of minorities and refugees might finally get the chance to have their voices heard.