Mrs. Elennor Roosevelt yesterday urged United States ratification of the United Nations' Covenant of Human Rights at a speech to an overflow audience in Sanders Theatre.

Speaking to a Harvard-Radcliffe crowd of 1200 persons, Mrs. Roosevelt distinguished between the "Declaration of Human Rights" and the "Covenant of Human Rights," and then told of the difficulties involved in getting an agreement among nations on either document.

The Declaration, which was accepted by 48 nations at the UN meeting in Paris last year, states what should be the rights of all people, while the Covenant is a legal treaty among nations binding them to the protection of these "universal rights" for all their citizens.

Differences in People

The main troubles cited by Mrs. Roosevelt which make it hard for nations to agree on a declaration of human rights are differences in habits, customs, language, and religion.

"In Paris a lady asked me if I thought American women would be interested in a book she had written," Mrs. Roosevelt said. "I asked her what it was, and she said 'Why, it's on the advantages of multiple marriage over divorce.' The lady was a Moslem, and her lack of understanding of our social customs is typical of the larger troubles we had in getting many nations to agree on a definition of human rights.

The Covenant of Human Rights, which gives legal value to the Declaration, is now is the process of being approved by the individual nations. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, it will run in to more difficulty than the Declaration did.

In framing the Covenant, the Commission of Human Rights encountered the problem of the difference between Napoleonic law from which the laws of many Latin countries are derived, and British Common Law, which is the basis of the English and American systems, Mrs. Roosevelt said.

"One of the French delegates spoke of individual rights and used the term 'personnalite juridique.' I interpreted that as juridical personality, and immediately the American lawyers said we could not use that term in the covenant since it had never been used in American courts before."

The Soviet Union delegate opposed the idea of a covenant guaranteeing the human rights described in the Declaration because they believed that enforcement of rights was purely a state matter, Mrs. Roosevelt said. They had previously abstained from approval of the Declaration because it said that "all people should be free to move within their country's borders and to enter and leave the country freely."

In a final appeal for the people to act on the Covenant, Mrs. Roosevelt said that "this may be one of the ways that we learn to live together in the world . . . so the citizens should let their representatives know what they think should be done. . . . The citizens take not only the responsibility, but also the result of whatever is done."