A CONVERSATION WITH HABIB MALIK

The following was taken from an October 9, 1998, conversation with Habib Malik about the crucial role his father, Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, played in crafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 50 years ago.

When Lebanon became independent of French rule in 1943, it began along with other newly formed countries, to organize in terms of overseas representation in anticipation of the ending of the war. For a number of reasons, my father's name came up. He was teaching at the American University of Beirut, and his name was suggested by the British, after the Vichy French were ousted, as an ideal person to represent Lebanon in Washington. This meant a number of things initially: to set up an embassy in Washington as well as head the Lebanese delegation to the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945.

He signed the U.N. Charter on behalf of Lebanon there. The Charter mentions human rights several times, the need for the United Nations to get involved in human rights and specifically, in creating a kind of manifesto of rights.

In 1946, UNESCO was officially asked to sound out a number of philosophers, among them Jacques Maritain of France and Richard McKeon of England, to see if there was any basis for a cross- cultural, universal rights movement. What they found was very interesting: that across the board in various cultures there seemed to be a spontaneous consensus on some very basic rights.

In early 1947, the Commission on Human Rights was set up under the presidency of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was in a unique position to shepherd this enterprise through the U.N. That was her main role and it was a very crucial one. Without that, very little could have been accomplished, because you needed someone with the clout and with the authority of the United States, and also with the grace of this lady, to actually bring this off.

Initially, my father was elected rapporteur of the Human Rights Commission. He's the one who actually gathered what happened in the meetings and put together a detailed report. John Humphrey of Canada was the director of the human rights division of the U.N. Secretariat at the time, also a very interesting man. There was also Rene Cassin, a very important French legal expert, who had worked in London with Charles De Gaulle during the war. Many members of his family perished in the Holocaust. And then you had P.C. Chang of China; he brought in his version of Oriental philosophy, his knowledge of Confucianism and the whole world outlook of that part of the world. So there, you already had a very interesting mix of the Middle East, the West, the Far East. There were others, as well. The Russians sent a number of delegates between 1947 and 1948.

The Commission began to meet in early 1947. In a series of meetings at the time, the whole issue of putting together some kind of international document was discussed at length, and there were various strategies that were suggested.

From day one, it was obvious that the Soviets were not very comfortable with this whole enterprise and, as time went on, were increasingly filibustering and creating obstacles. The Soviets and their satellites would use the U.N. and its committees to give long, ideological tirades about the importance of the state, collectivity, class differences and so on. Finally, my father decided to respond, because all the Western delegates were essentially just taking it. He gave this very interesting speech in which he said the state is actually created for the sake of the individual, not the other way around.

The next day, Mrs. Roosevelt came in and said: "Dr. Malik's speech yesterday was attacked by a number of people. Let me just say for the record that we are fully in agreement with his position."

So in that sense, you could almost trace the opening shot of the ideological side of the Cold War from there, and from then on both the British and the U.S. delegates became much more attuned to what the Soviets were doing. A lot was going on at that time: as this whole enterprise was unfolding about human rights, the Cold War was heating up and the international atmosphere was becoming more and more poisoned.

The interesting thing about the Universal Declaration was that it took place at a very unique moment in history -- between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Those few months were the only time when you could have achieved some semblance of an international consensus over a set of rights like these.

Several meetings took place in 1947 and 1948, both in Lake Success and Geneva. Finally, a decision was made to relegate to the Secretariat the task of producing a first draft. John Humphrey and his team did a very good job. They made full use of the recommendations and suggestions that came in from the various philosophers, also a lot of NGOs, like the International Labour Organization (ILO), and some Catholic and Jewish organizations. All of these had their input. However, this resulted in a document that was about 400 pages. It couldn't really serve as a basis for producing a condensed document like the Universal Declaration.

It was eventually decided that the task of producing a first draft had to be given to a much smaller body or even a single person. Rene Cassin was chosen. What he did was look at the document from the French Revolution -- The Declaration of the Rights of Man. He also got copies of writs of habeas corpus and the Magna Carta.

He used these documents to produce a draft of what the Universal Declaration should look like. It was at the time referred to as the International Bill of Rights. Cassin also wrote a preamble, but it was voted down. His draft was taken and analyzed and discussed article by article within the Commission. This is where a lot of refinements and additions and changes occurred.

Earlier this year, I was looking at my father's memoirs, particularly the parts on human rights. He has a huge diary, spanning 60 years. It's a very interesting document. I can tell you right away that he was responsible for four things in the Universal Declaration.

First, on June 12, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt asked him to put together a preamble. At the time, he was still ambassador to Washington and also Lebanon's representative to the United Nations and rapporteur of the Commission. He also was elected president of the U.N. Economic and Social Council. She asked him on a Friday to put together a preamble, so he did that over the weekend.

Chang objected to the word "inalienable" in the preamble, but his objection was voted down, so the word remained there. In my opinion, the preamble is one of the more important parts of the Universal Declaration. It contains a lot of philosophically technical words that are very important -- inalienable, inherent, and so on -- all of these are crucial terms. It was passed unanimously, with only stylistic tightening here and there by Cassin.

The second contribution from my father is Article 18, the article on religious freedom. He developed it and added the very crucial concept of the right to change one's religion and also the right to worship both in private and in public -- both individually and collectively. Why is this important? Islam, for instance, finds it very difficult to accept the concept of the right to change one's religion. In fact, according to Shari'a law, it's called "riddah" and it can be punishable by death. If you're born a Muslim you cannot change your religion. This created a lot of problems. Here you have a Christian Arab from Lebanon suggesting this. The Islamic world found that very difficult to accept.

The nice thing about the Universal Declaration is that you can claim that it was passed unanimously -- by those who actually voted. When voting time came, there was not one vote against it. Instead, the representative from Pakistan, Zafrullah Khan, convinced the Islamic delegates to abstain. South Africa abstained, because they just couldn't go with this and maintain the apartheid system. And the Soviets and their group abstained, because, according to them, there was an excessive emphasis on individual and political rights, as opposed to economic and social rights, and because this whole enterprise was incompatible with running a totalitarian state.

My father's third contribution is Article 28, which says that all the rights within this document are guaranteed for everybody. In other words -- again, this is my father directly -- this is an added security clause to ensure that the document will not be fragmented, so that it cannot be said that people are more entitled to certain rights than to others.

He and the delegation of Lebanon also had a lot of input on the articles dealing with the family and marriage (Article 16) and the right to emigrate or travel (Article 13).

The fourth and maybe the most important contribution my father made came in the fall of 1948, when the U.N. General Assembly's Third Committee was delegated with the task of going through and approving the final draft of the Universal Declaration and then offering it to the General Assembly for a vote. Remember the international situation was falling apart by then -- the Berlin Airlift, the situation in Korea was heating up, the Middle East, the whole initiation of the Cold War. Against this backdrop they all met in Paris in the fall of 1948, at the Palais de Chaillot.

My father was elected -- by secret ballot -- the president of the Third Committee. So under his presidency, for 85 meetings, they went through every little comma in the draft to produce the final text that the General Assembly could vote on. There was a great need at the time to speed up the process, because if this process was to spill over into 1949, it would probably have been scuttled.

Initially, the whole human rights project was a tripartite project. There was the initial task of producing the document, mainly enshrining the rights in some kind of manifesto. Secondly, there was the idea of the covenants -- in other words a series of covenants that would be binding. The initial document would not be binding; the covenants would. They would involve signatures by countries. And thirdly, there would have to be a mechanism of implementation.

It was clear to my father and others that there was no way all three were going to be done by the end of the fall of 1948, so the feeling was to go ahead and produce the actual document and then worry about the covenants and the implementation later on. Because already a general document like that, which was not binding, was receiving a lot of resistance; a lot of obstacles were being put in place by the Soviets and others.

Even then, human rights was the third topic on the agenda of the Third Committee. My father moved it up to number one, but they were in fact interrupted several times by the refugee issue. So you had a very charged agenda, very little time, the constant intrusion of the refugee problem, the heating up of the international situation, and in the discussions, you had the Russian delegate, Pavlov, trying to delay as much as possible. For every article that came up, he would have an amendment and he would go into these long tirades and speeches. Finally, my father had to devise a way of just getting though this process. So he got a stopwatch and he said: "everybody, I don't care who it is, has three minutes."

So actually, the fourth contribution was how he railroaded this thing through the committee and after 85 sessions managed to present the final text to the General Assembly for a vote before the end of the year. And he gave a speech on the 9th of December where he tried his best to say that everybody had a hand in making this Universal Declaration. Even the Russians, who had given him a lot of grief over the past 85 sessions, he didn't say one word that's negative about them. Instead he says: "thanks to the Soviet delegation we were awakened to the importance of economic and social rights." So everybody got mentioned in that speech as having given something positive. So there you have a human rights moment in history. It was unique.

Habib Malik and the Charles Malik Foundation are planning a series of events in Beirut, Lebanon, in December to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the major role that Charles Malik played in the process. The events include the publication of a book in Arabic entitled: Charles Malik: the Role of Lebanon in the Making of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Lebanese television is planning to air a 45-minute Arab-language documentary on Charles Malik and the UDHR on December 9. A three-day conference on human rights is also scheduled for December 8-10. The first session will focus on individual rights and take place at the Lebanese American University; the second session will focus on pluralism and collective rights and take place at the University of the Holy Spirit; and the third session will focus on universality and take place at the American University of Beirut.