Copyright by Gregory Krauss 2007 - The University of Texas at Austin

Chapter 4. Building a Human Rights Policy
The term “human rights” was not one that Lister would frequently have heard
during the first 32 years of his State Department career. In his job at the Bureau of
Inter-American Affairs, Lister emphasized democracy, telling his audiences that the
U.S. government “has a clear, positive pro-democratic ideology.” 1 During the 1950s
and 1960s, the idea of giving “human rights” an emphasis in U.S. foreign policy was,
according to historian Lars Schoultz, considered utopian. 2 Human rights also
connoted a concern with how governments treated individuals within their borders.
Professional diplomats, however, have been traditionally “guided by the idea that
what a country does to its own citizens is not in any way something that another
country should engage in,” noted John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary of State for
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1993 to 1998. 3
The stirrings of the human rights issue were nonetheless evident from the very
beginning of Lister’s career. The U.S., in fact, had been involved in the creation of
some of the foundational human rights documents. In July 1941, as Lister was
beginning work at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Roosevelt and Churchill issued the
Atlantic Charter, a statement of democratic principles that they hoped would guide
nations after WWII. In 1948, during Lister’s tour of duty in Poland, the United
Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document which had
been drafted under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1970s, when human
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