RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: John Peters Humphrey

▪ 1996

      In 1968 French jurist René Cassin was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize as the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948. This document, which served as "a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations," was vitally important in focusing global attention on human rights, a term that previously had not been defined in any act of international law. Although some nations routinely violated the principles of the declaration, most countries not only accepted its precepts but adhered to them. In 1988, however, John Hobbins of the law library at McGill University, Montreal, examined the original document and found that it had been written not in the hand of Cassin but in that of John Peters Humphrey.

      Humphrey, a Canadian lawyer, diplomat, and scholar, died in Montreal, on March 14, 1995, having been belatedly recognized as the architect of the "Magna Carta of mankind." He was born April 30, 1905, in Hampton, N.B. His childhood was unfortunate. At the age of six he lost his left arm in a fire, and from the age of 11 he was raised in orphanages. Humphrey entered Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B., at 15 and was called to the Quebec bar in 1929. He practiced law until 1936, when he joined the faculty of McGill, specializing in international law. In 1946 he was appointed the first director of the Division of Human Rights for the UN Secretariat, a post he held for two decades. It was there that he penned the Declaration.

      In 1966 he returned to McGill, and he remained active as a human rights crusader, helping to establish both the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and the Canadian branch of Amnesty International. Humphrey was the author of numerous books, notably Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure (1984) and No Distant Millennium: The World Law of Human Rights (1989). (KAREN J. SPARKS)

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