C9

Erin Dwyer
For the Telegraph-Journal

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

HAMPTON - It was 60 years ago today that Hampton's John Peters Humphrey saw his work come to fruition.

Enlarge Photo

Noel Chenier/Telegraph-Journal

The John Peters Humphrey monument in Hampton features a mahogany sculpture of Humphrey as an adult and a young boy.

The United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a significant milestone in the global development of fundamental rights.

Appointed in 1946 as the first director in the Human Rights Division of the United Nations, Humphrey soon after began work on the preliminary draft of what Eleanor Roosevelt would later dub "the international Magna Carta of all mankind."

Humphrey came from humble beginnings.

Born in Hampton, he lost both his parents to illness at an early age. After a childhood accident, he also lost an arm to amputation. Still, this orphan boy would spend the last half of his life engaging leaders around the world in an international discourse on human rights.

Humphrey's monumental contribution to human rights, however, was long overlooked and his rightful place as Hampton's most important native son came only after his death in 1995.

"It's an important piece of doctrine," Dale Sommerville, the chairman of the Hampton John Peters Humphrey Foundation, said of the declaration. "But Canadians don't put much time in thinking about human rights until something happens to them and they lose them."

That's one of the reasons that the foundation worked for nine years to establish a monument to John Peters Humphrey in the town. This summer, it unveiled the CREDO project, which it hopes will not only raise the profile of the man but also promote and educate people about human rights.

Two three-metre sandstone columns - one featuring a water fountain and the other four engraved articles of the Declaration of Human Rights that Humphrey drafted in 1947 - stand side by side next to a circular ash bench upon which sit three bronze doves and the mahogany sculpture of Humphrey - one side featuring him as an adult, the other as a young boy.

"We hope that people will come here and appreciate the declaration itself and relate to it," Sommerville said. "We hope that CREDO will be a focal point for human rights education within the school system."

For 40 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was attributed to Rene Cassin of France, who was even awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968 for this work. However, in 1988, while researchers were going through papers at McGill University, Humphrey's original handwritten draft was discovered.

Humphrey continued working for the United Nations for 20 years, during which he oversaw the implementation of 67 international conventions and the constitutions of dozens of countries. After his retirement from the UN in 1966, he remained active in the promotion of human rights internationally and in Canada until his death at the age of 90.

It was during this time that he worked on the team to launch Amnesty International Canada.

Last week, Alex Neve, the secretary general for Amnesty International Canada, was the keynote speaker at a human rights forum in Hampton, an annual event staged by the foundation to mark the anniversary.

With the monument unveiled, the work of the foundation is not over, Sommerville said. It will continue to perpetuate the name of Humphrey and what the man stood for.

"We'll continue to work on human rights issues, like the forum and hopefully it will develop into high profile speakers coming to the town."