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C h a p t e r 4 Charles Malik, the International Bill of Rights, and Ultimate Things Shortly after the conclusion of the first session of the United Nations General Assembly, members of the U.S. delegation submitted a memorandum to the State Department detailing their assessment of the “politics and personnel” of the UN. Lebanese representative Dr. Charles H. Malik, they reported, had become considerably more skilled as a diplomat since the San Francisco conference, and while he could not always be counted on to line up with the United States when the votes were counted, he came closest of all the Arab delegations to “speaking our language.” Of Carlos Romulo, the American advisors admitted that despite his obvious conceit and intense ambition , the Filipino general was “one of the outstanding personalities of the whole Assembly.” Romulo had positioned himself as the champion of “those colonial peoples of the world who want freedom and independence,” but, the memo happily reported, he was also committed to “working with the white man, providing the white man is at all reasonable.” In a conclusion that might well have applied to the head of the Lebanese mission as much as the one from the Philippines, the U.S. delegation assured their superiors at the State Department that Romulo and his team would be “valuable friends of the United States providing we continue with a forward looking, progressive policy in our relations with the less advanced nations of the world.”1 Neither Malik nor Romulo would have found much to disagree with in the secret profiles of them offered by the American delegation. Indeed, both would have been gratified to be counted as friends of the United States—​­ worthy and important friends at that. The previous chapter made clear that Carlos Romulo would have been particularly satisfied to know that the 104 Chapter 4 American delegation felt a subtle and friendly pressure to maintain their lead in colonial policy as the most liberal colonial power. Like Romulo, Charles Malik placed his ability to influence American policy at the center of his diplomatic strategy, mobilizing his affinity for and experience with the United States in the service of his particular global agenda. Also like Romulo, Malik’s close association with the U.S. led many to assume his subordination to the dictates of Washington. In later years, his critical facilitation of the 1957 U.S. invasion of Lebanon only solidified his reputation as a proxy for American power in the Middle East.2 And yet, he, like Romulo, cultivated his friendship with the United States not simply to do the bidding of successive American administrations, but to have the opportunity to shape the terms of American engagement with the world. Nowhere was this strategy more evident than in his work on behalf of international human rights, a cause with which Malik was closely identified in the first decade after the Second World War. In this too, he was like his Filipino counterpart, but Malik’s engagement with human rights was more profound than Romulo’s. Certainly, Malik played a larger role in the Human Rights Commission. At the first session, on Romulo’s nomination, he was elected rapporteur of the commission and served alongside Chairman Eleanor Roosevelt and Vice-​­ Chairman Peng Chun Chang during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As rapporteur, Malik was in a unique position to prepare and present the reports of the commission’s work to the Economic and Social Council and General Assembly, as well as author a number of articles on human rights in various UN publications. Malik succeeded Roosevelt as chairman in 1952, and while only serving for two sessions he was critical to keeping the work on the human rights covenants from stalling out, as it had for the freedom of information convention. From these positions, Malik made seminal contributions to both the content and structure of the International Bill of Rights, advocating for a legally binding international human rights law, stressing the priority and autonomy of the individual and what he called “intermediate institutions,” protecting intellectual and spiritual freedoms (including the right to change deeply held beliefs), and establishing a coherent philosophical foundation for the UN human rights program. With the possible exception of John Humphrey, no individual contributed more. Malik’s engagement with human rights was uncommonly profound for another reason. Certainly he, like Romulo, viewed the international human rights system as both a symbol and a channel of U.S...

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