Brief Summary
The Setup
To quote Les Misérables, "The time is now! The day is here!"
It's time to get our worldwide human rights housekeeping in order, and Eleanor Roosevelt is giving everyone brooms.
The Text
When Roosevelt delivered her speech, "On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," she did so because the document hadn't actually been adopted yet.
Instead, countries with different political philosophies were arguing over proposed changes to various articles—which they'd already argued over. Multiple times. And Roosevelt had had enough.
The delegation had a responsibility to approve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of what it was trying to accomplish—for the first time in history, 58 different nations had found some common ground when it came to the complex field of human rights.
No one was going to get everything they wanted, and it wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But having an official document, approved by so many different countries, was important to preserving peace and protecting the world from another large-scale violation of basic human rights.
TL;DR
"All this happened, more or less...because the delegation wouldn't just give their approval to a declaration guaranteeing basic human rights." Do you think Kurt Vonnegut would appreciate our edit?