We the peoples: humanists and the United Nations

Humanists helped build the United Nations, argued over its direction for decades, and still speak up at it today. On UN Day, we look back through our archive at the part humanists have played.

On 24 October 1945, the Charter of the United Nations came into force. Its opening words, ‘We the peoples of the United Nations’, set out an organisation meant to serve people everywhere, not just the governments that signed it. Humanists were among those who helped shape it and its agencies.

For United Nations Day, we’ve gone back over 80 years of humanist magazines and newsletters, now held in the New Humanist archive, to find out how humanists helped build the UN, how they pushed it to do better, and how Humanists UK carries that work on today.

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1942: ‘Not a word about Christianity’

The name ‘United Nations’ was first used during the Second World War, for the Allies fighting the Axis powers. In 1942, Britain’s ambassadors to the United States and Spain, Lord Halifax and Sir Samuel Hoare, framed the Allies’ cause in terms of ‘Christian civilisation’ and ‘Christian brotherhood’. When MPs challenged this in the House of Commons that October, the Foreign Office defended it. The President of the Rationalist Press Association, Surgeon Rear-Admiral Charles Beadnell, wrote to the minister, Richard Law, to object.

The ideals of the United Nations, he argued, were shared by people of every religion and none. Calling them Christian risked alienating friends and allies from Turkey to China, and much of the Commonwealth, where Christians were a minority. And the Atlantic Charter, the statement of war aims drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt, said nothing about Christianity.

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1945–1949: Humanists at the founding

When delegates met in San Francisco in 1945 to agree the UN Charter, the agnostic anthropologist and campaigner Eslanda Goode Robeson attended, representing the Council on African Affairs, which campaigned against colonial rule.

Humanists went on to lead two of the UN’s new agencies. The biologist Julian Huxley became the first Director-General of UNESCO in 1946, and later the first President of the British Humanist Association, now Humanists UK. In his founding essay for the organisation, he wrote that UNESCO’s outlook ‘must, it seems, be based on some form of humanism’.

The nutritionist John Boyd Orr became the first Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945, setting out to end hunger as a cause of war. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949, and later presided over the second congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), now Humanists International.

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1953: A court for the world

Humanists didn’t just cheer the UN on. They wanted it to work better. In June 1953, the Ethical Union, the organisation that became Humanists UK, published its own amendments to the UN Charter, for the British Government to put forward at a review conference expected in 1955.

It proposed that member states commit to removing the major inequalities between nations within 50 years. It also drafted a whole new chapter for the Charter, setting up an International Criminal Court, alongside a civilian international police force that would inspect disarmament treaties and supervise elections.

The review conference never took place, and the Ethical Union’s court would have judged states rather than individuals. But the idea of a permanent international criminal court came back: 45 years later, in 1998, states agreed the Rome Statute, and the International Criminal Court came into being in 2002.

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1954: The right to complain

As the UN drafted the treaties that would turn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into law, the Ethical Union asked the UK Government to back a right of individual petition: the power for a person whose rights had been violated to complain to the UN directly.

The Foreign Office said no. In its reply, printed in News and Notes in December 1954, it argued that states, not individuals, were the proper subjects of international law, and that a right of petition might become an instrument of political agitation.

Seventy years on, the UK still hasn’t signed up to the individual complaints procedure under the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: when the UN Human Rights Committee last reviewed the UK, in 2024, it asked the Government to reconsider. Individuals can take their own case to the European Court of Human Rights, a right the UK accepted in 1966, and that is part of why Humanists UK defends the European Convention on Human Rights today.

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1956–1987: Freedom of belief, for everyone

In 1956, the UN was about to begin a worldwide study of discrimination in matters of religion and belief, using Article 18 of the Universal Declaration – the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – as a starting point. The Ethical Union, which planned to submit evidence, asked its members for suggestions and offered some British examples of its own: bishops sitting in Parliament by right, a daily act of Christian worship in state schools, and the BBC’s refusal to give non-Christian views a fair hearing.

Seventy years later, Humanists UK is still campaigning to remove the bishops from the House of Lords and to replace compulsory worship with inclusive assemblies.

Progress came slowly. In 1987, Humanist News welcomed a report to the UN Commission on Human Rights by Elizabeth Odio Benito, drawing on evidence from the IHEU. It recognised that freedom of belief protects non-religious beliefs too, naming agnosticism, free thought, atheism, and rationalism.

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1969–1982: ‘Better to talk than fight’

By the late 1960s, the UN was struggling with the arms race, Biafra, and the Middle East, and many people had grown cynical. The Humanist urged its readers to resist that. As long as power politics governed the world, its November 1969 editorial said, the UN could be little more than a talking-shop, ‘but it is better to talk than fight’. It called the work of the UN’s food and health agencies ‘Humanism in action’.

On 24 October 1970, the British Humanist Association held its annual dinner on United Nations Day itself, with the science writer and humanist Ritchie Calder as guest of honour. Drawing on 25 years of work with the UN and its agencies, he argued that hunger and pollution weren’t unsolvable, but needed the steady application of reason.

When British humanists drew up a calendar of humanist special days in the 1970s and 1980s, United Nations Day was on it, alongside World Humanist Day, Human Rights Day, and Evolution Day.

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2026: At the UN today

Humanists UK now speaks regularly at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, holding governments, including the UK, to their human rights commitments. In recent years it has:

• called on countries including Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, the Maldives, Mauritania, and the United Arab Emirates to repeal their blasphemy and apostasy laws, or to stop punishing ‘offences’ under them with death
• repeatedly raised the case of Mubarak Bala, President of the Nigerian Humanist Association, who was freed in August 2024 after nearly four and a half years in prison for ‘blasphemous’ Facebook posts
• urged the UK Government to close illegal religious schools and legally recognise humanist marriages
• argued in June that ‘religious freedom’ can’t justify conversion practices
• challenged, at the Council’s latest session, misleading claims about the European Court of Human Rights, which since 1980 has found only 13 times that a UK decision to deport or extradite someone would breach the Convention

Speaking at the Council in June, Laura Newlyn, Policy and Campaigns Manager, set out the principle behind much of this work:

‘We uphold the right to freedom of religion or belief – or FoRB – for all, but this right cannot be invoked to justify abuse.’

The arguments humanists made in 1942 still hold: human rights belong to everyone, whatever they believe, and no single religion speaks for humanity. Eighty-one years after the Charter came into force, Humanists UK will keep making that case wherever it is needed, in Geneva as much as in Westminster.