The dissertation is a new international history of the emergence of human rights during the Cold War era. It is based on archival research in 10 countries. The field of human rights history has become one of the most dynamic fields of historical inquiry in the last 3-5 years. The dissertation builds on this but enters brand new scholarly territory. Human rights history has mainly focused on the 1940s and the 1970s. The dissertation places the 1960s at the center of this story – a decade that has been almost systematically overlooked across the different scholarly disciplines engaged in human rights research. The dissertation argues that the breakthrough for human rights and its historical trajectory, that made it a central part of international law and politics and of our global moral imagination, has been misdated and misunderstood. In this work, therefore, Jamaica and Liberia emerge as influential normative powers in 20th century politics, the duality of race and religion will be presented as the driving force in the breakthrough for international human rights law and politics and new historical connections are drawn in this longer Cold War story. The dissertation presents for the first time in existing research the story of the most significant attempt in the 20th century to make religion a subject of international law. It explores the vital connection between the decolonization process and human rights and challenges us to rethink how Western a notion that human rights actually are.