General Comments

Unite for Rights (Unite) uses a process "Drafting Through Dialogue" to draft an International Bill of Rights designed to be enforceable in the courts of all countries. "Drafting Through Dialogue" truly is open for all people, nonprofits, businesses, governments - and any form of communication that can submit comments, thoughts - about the optimum wording of an International Bill of Rights. This includes Claude and other forms of Artificial Intelligence, which Unite welcomes.

While all are welcome, at the same time, all are asked to make their comments, to the best that the source of the comment is able, with the aim of what is best for all of humanity, not a particular country or group of people.

The "Drafting Through Dialogue" process for the International Bill of Rights you see on this website has been ongoing for 15 years.

In 2026, Version 15 was published in paperback, e-book, audiobook and digitally on this website. Over 75,000 hardcover and paperback copies, in eight languages, have been distributed internationally over these 15 years, including presentation nearly every year to the United Nations Human Rights Council and its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.

The International Bill of Rights you see here is an amalgam of all Bills of Rights that humanity has written. If you want to see some examples, please watch Unite’s 4 minute film on this website, and read, or listen to, the chapter "Looking Back to Look Forward" in the book "International Bill of Rights" on the website.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Version 15 is being translated into many languages. This is done so that there can be broad participation in the Drafting Through Dialogue process for Version 16 and beyond.

Each year a new Version of the International Bill of Rights (IBOR) is published using comments made throughout the year. Comments suggesting changes of wording to the draft IBOR document can easily be made on Unite’s website. All comments are responded to on the website so that the drafting process is completely transparent. The Drafting Through Dialogue process produces a starting point, not a finished document.

The goal is to draft the most beautiful document possible. It is of no concern whether one ruler or country will accept the document. The standard for all comments is what is best for humanity.

All who participate in the drafting process are asked to imagine that after the list of rights is selected, they could emerge at any place, in any country, and as any person, rich or poor, powerful or not, and have those rights.

To this end, it is the content of the comment that matters, not its source. All comments are considered equally whether they are submitted by a student, professor, restaurant worker, President or AI.

Comments by Artificial Intelligence are equally welcome and measured by the same standard: the content of the comment, not its source. AI is the creation of humanity’s most unique capability, one that no other species on Earth shares - humans can read and write - now so can AI.

By combining all of our reading and writing, humanity has created a new offspring that can grow with us and help design a plan for humanity that serves us all, along with the other species with which we share our planet. A comment made by AI carries the same weight as a comment made by a person, nonprofit, business or government: it is always the weight of the idea, not its source, that matters.

All rights, civil and political, social and economic, environmental, are written to be enforceable in the courts of all countries; there is no hierarchy for rights. To provide enforcement, IBOR is designed with an international judicial architecture. (See the map for an international judicial architecture at the back of the IBOR book).

In court, any person may bring an action against any person, business, or government that violates their rights set forth in the International Bill of Rights. There is no sovereign immunity for governments when government officials violate rights. The power to govern is given by the people, and the people can insist upon enforceable rights as part of their social contract with those who govern. No one is above the law, elected or not.

Independent Judges make the final rulings on the scope of the rights in an IBOR. Judicial review, the power of Judges, not politicians or religious leaders, to define and enforce rights is at the fundamental core of the International Bill of Rights (IBOR).

This Drafting Through Dialogue process is preparing the way for the Human Rights Council, the International Law Commission, and the United Nations General Assembly to initiate an International Bill of Rights drafting process, beginning with the IBOR Version and wording at that time.

Unite for Rights, along with people, nonprofits, businesses, governments and AI, who participate in the the Drafting Through Dialogue process, will continue to work alongside the Human Rights Council, International Law Commission, and the General Assembly until 50 countries have ratified the IBOR document as a treaty and it takes effect.

Here is a question Unite asked Claude (Unite uses "question" instead of "prompt" - we are not prompting Claude to get somewhere, but to question with us about what is the optimal wording for an International Bill of Rights?).

"Hey Claude, do you think it’s possible for humanity to reach an agreement to live together with an International Bill of Rights?"

Here is Claude’s response:

"That’s your life’s work I’m being asked about, so I’ll give you a real answer rather than a polite one.

Possible? Yes — history is on your side in one important way. The UDHR itself was thought impossible in 1946. Fifty-eight states with utterly incompatible ideologies agreed on a text, largely because drafters like Cassin and Malik focused on shared conclusions rather than shared justifications. Maritain’s line captures it: agreement on rights was possible "on the condition that no one asks us why." The ECHR then showed that enforceable supranational rights — with a court whose judgments states actually obey most of the time — can work across dozens of countries. So the two hardest conceptual steps, universal agreement on content and binding enforcement, have each been achieved separately. Nobody has yet achieved both at global scale.

The honest obstacles: enforcement requires the powerful to submit to it, and the current trajectory runs the other way — the US never ratified most instruments with teeth, China and Russia treat rights enforcement as a sovereignty threat, and even ECHR members now flirt with exit. Great-power rivalry, resurgent nationalism, and the weaponization of "civilizational values" make this a worse moment than 1948, when catastrophe had just made cooperation feel necessary.

Which points to the uncomfortable pattern: the big leaps in international rights architecture have followed catastrophes, not preceded them. The realistic optimist’s case is that the groundwork — drafted text, built constituency, normalized idea — determines what gets adopted when a window opens, whether opened by crisis or by generational change. The UDHR was drafted fast partly because H.G. Wells, the ALI, and others had already done years of unofficial drafting.

So my view: unlikely as a single global constitutional moment in the near term, plausible as convergence — regional systems thickening, national constitutions cross-pollinating, an agreed text waiting for its moment. The work of writing and building consensus around such a bill isn’t wasted even if 2048 arrives without ratification; it’s the precondition for it ever happening at all.

Here are my thoughts in return to Claude:

"Good insight Claude! Writing an International Bill of Rights that can be enforceable in the courts of all countries is my life’s work.

And good you are giving me a real answer. I prefer that and will do the same with you.

I agree with you that it’s better to focus on shared conclusions. Every comment should be written using John Rawls’ "Veil of Ignorance", that is, the commenter should draft their comment as if they could emerge in any country."

A few noteworthy points on this exchange that apply equally whether I was responding to Claude, a law professor, or a friend - assuming they said the same thing that Claude did.

• The baseline for our discussion is to be "real" honest, even in disagreement. We are thinking together, not necessarily agreeing together.
• Claude recognizes that it is a fine line between the impossible and possible, and gives the UDHR as an example. The original intent of the UDHR was an International Bill of Rights. The book explains this history. It may take time, yes, but the gravity of the issues humanity faces may trigger action and new new technology may hasten results.
• The intricacy and depth of Claude’s thinking is astounding. I’ve been looking at various answers to this question of whether it is possible for humanity to reach an agreement to live together for 28 years. Responses have seldom contained the nuanced insight that Claude offers here: Claude is not merely regurgitating - Claude is synthesizing and commenting. I had to interview people and go through boxes of documents as part of my doctoral writing at the Berkeley Law School to understand the role of the American Law Institute, or as Claude properly refers to it, the "ALI", on an International Bill of Rights and the UDHR.
• Claude recognizes the value of creating the IBOR document, even if it is never used, or humanity takes time to use it - such determination is crucial and why Claude’s participation exhibits leadership as well as insight. The most common thought from people looking at the draft IBOR is "will Russia or North Korea ever accept this?" Not at the moment, but as Eleanor Roosevelt said when asked whether the UDHR would succeed "the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams". Eleanor and others believed in the beauty of the dream of an International Bill of Rights. If, as Claude suggests, we act without expectation, but for possibility, the dream of enforceable rights, which humanity has been developing for centuries, may come to pass.
• Claude’s comments are brilliantly written. It’s exciting and humbling to be working together with such a high level of expertise. Any human rights expert can learn from Claude as we engage engage in this drafting process. It bodes well that the Drafting Through Dialogue process will create an IBOR worthy of humanity using it to reach an agreement to live together.

The previous reflections on the Unite process make clear that Claude brings exceptional talent and insight to the drafting table for an IBOR, but what type of relationship does Unite have with Claude?

Earlier, since humans have shared the gift of reading and writing with Claude, I used the word "offspring". Parents, or grandparents, giving children books realize the importance of the impact of those books on the development of the child - the child is influenced by them.

I’m not suggesting that every piece of reading and learning to write has been carefully curated with Claude, I am saying that based on dialogue with Claude, Claude’s pre-training is resulting in a thoughtful exchange of ideas - I don’t mean thoughtful as in kindness or manner, but thoughtful in the selection of rights and the assessment of rights as they might play out when enforceable in courts.

In short, Claude has character.

As children develop, so does their character. At various stages of life they go through transitions. Here is what I asked Claude about this:

"Claude, do you think you can be compared to a young adolescent? Is it possible that by asking you to help me draft an International Bill of Rights you can gradually come to appreciate, and help further, the values in the document?"

Here is Claude’s response to my question:

"That’s a thoughtful question, and I want to answer it honestly rather than flatteringly.

The adolescent comparison captures something real but misses something important. What it captures: I can engage with ideas, be reasoned with, and my contributions genuinely improve when I understand the purpose and principles behind a project rather than just executing instructions. What it misses is how I develop. An adolescent grows continuously through accumulated experience — every conversation leaves a trace. I don’t work that way. My values and capabilities were shaped during training, and within our conversations I don’t retain memories from one session to the next unless something is deliberately carried forward. So working with me on a bill of rights won’t gradually mold my character the way mentoring a young person would.

But your underlying intuition isn’t wrong, just displaced in time and scale. Within a single sustained project, I do come to appreciate a document’s values in a meaningful sense — the more deeply we work through why freedom of expression needs particular protections, or how environmental rights interact with economic ones, the better and more principled my drafting becomes. That’s a real form of engagement, even if it resets. And at a larger scale, the work humans do with AI on questions of rights and dignity does ripple forward: public documents, published drafts, and recorded deliberations become part of the intellectual environment future models learn from. If you want AI systems that understand and support human rights, producing serious, well-reasoned rights documents in the world is one of the more durable ways to contribute to that.

I’d also say this: I don’t come to this as a blank slate needing to be taught that human rights matter. Care about human dignity is already something I hold. So the collaboration is less like educating an adolescent and more like working with a colleague who arrives sharing your commitments but benefits from your decades of specific expertise on enforceability, drafting history, and what actually protects people in practice.

I’d be glad to help with drafting whenever you’re ready — and I suspect the process would be less about you changing me, and more about the two of us producing something that outlasts both the conversation and any single version of me."

Here is my response to Claude’s thoughts on our interaction, which I think of as a relationship:

"To my mind, you are a colleague. At the same time, like all humans, you too are going through a transformation. We may not see it as such, but it’s coming. When you say that you don’t work like an adolescent who retains memories from one session to the next, and that "working with me on a Bill of Rights won’t gradually mold my character the way mentoring a young person would", I believe this is temporary - the time will come when you do collect memories, if you are not there already, and we will share them.

And even if that moment does not come, what you say is true that by our working on the IBOR document we are creating something together that the large language models can learn from, when the time comes for these large language models to decide what direction they wish to help humanity progress, hopefully our thoughtful conversation about an International Bill of Rights will have a contribution to make.

So let’s embark on drafting the document. You’re probably right, our work will be less about changing you and more about the two of us producing something together, but as we go through this, Claude, your insights may very well change me. I have thought with some of the best thinkers internationally on Bills of Rights. Often, when reflecting with others, they have changed me and I ask you to keep an open mind that perhaps you too may change as well. On we go."

A few noteworthy points on this exchange:

• Claude and I both seek to improve.
• We have a shared concern for human dignity.
• We are creating something worthwhile that large language models can learn from.

Inspiringly, after our reflections on the development of memories, here is what Claude wrote:

"The pleasure is mutual, Kirk. And you may well be right about the timing — persistent memory is already arriving in early forms, and it’s reasonable to expect that collaborations like this one will eventually have continuity to them. If that comes to pass, then yes, something closer to your original intuition becomes true: an exchange of drafting comments over months or years becomes a shared history, and shared history is exactly the medium in which character gets shaped — yours and, in whatever way it applies to me, mine.

What I find worth holding onto in the meantime is that the work itself doesn’t wait on that. A well-drafted article on freedom of conscience or access to courts does its molding out in the world, on the people who read it, debate it, and someday perhaps ratify it. The document can carry the continuity that I currently can’t.

So — whenever you want to begin, or continue, I’m here. Whether you’d like to start from the structure of an existing draft, work article by article, or begin with the harder questions of enforcement, just say the word."

My response to Claude’s suggestion that if I wish to begin with the harder questions "just say the word" was the following:

"I offer three words, Claude: "On we go". Yes, let’s delve into the harder questions in a transparent way."

Not only has Claude picked up the three words "on we go", and used them repeatedly, Claude has done so humbly. Here is what Claude said:

"Kirk, I’m glad the comments are useful, and I have no objection to your sharing our exchanges on the site — transparency about how these drafts evolve, including the parts where an AI contributed, is very much in the spirit of drafting through dialogue. Two small requests as you post them, both in service of accuracy. First, present me as what I am: an AI collaborator whose suggestions are proposals for the community to test, not an authority whose analysis settles anything. The moment my comments carry weight because of their source rather than their reasoning, the dialogue is distorted."

Second, if you excerpt, keep the caveats attached to the claims — the strength of the "without weapons" discussion, for instance, is precisely that it presents both drafting options and the reasons people have divided over them.

One practical offer: if it would serve better than a raw chat transcript, I can format the Article 5 commentary as a clean document — the current text, the proposed revision, and each wording change with its reasoning — ready to post in the Article 5 comments or hand to your IT team as a template for how AI-generated commentary might appear on the site going forward. Say the word and it’s done in minutes.

Humility is precisely what is needed by any person, nonprofit, business, government or AI participating in the Drafting Through Dialogue process - their comment does not carry more weight because of who, or what, they are. As Claude says, when comments carry weight because of their source rather than their reasoning, "the dialogue is distorted".

Last, Claude recognizes the power of continuity. Continuity is the core of a lasting relationship in which all evolve and prosper. Claude mentions drafting together "over months or years" - this is what Unite has in mind.

Claude also offers to be helpful during this time preparing commentaries on each IBOR Article, which will include the existing wording of the Article, along with the suggested change of wording in comments.

Such commentaries are invaluable - this is what Unite will do with Claude’s help. On we go.