 Maritain had a significant influence in the development of and advocacy for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and his political philosophy had a substantial impact on ‘Christian Democratic’ parties in Western Europe, Chile, and Argentina (Saranyana, 1999–2002: 205), as well as on constitutional thinking in Latin America and, later, in Canada. His defence of natural rights, developed beginning in the late 1930s and provided in detail in Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (1942), was arguably present in the articulation of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (adopted by the Ninth International Conference of American States, in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1948) that, in turn, influenced several of the members of the Drafting Committee of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Moreover, not only were some of Maritain’s key writings read in advance by the Drafting Committee, but one of its key members, Charles Malik, followed Maritain’s political thought closely in several respects. It is not surprising, then, that the Declaration has close parallels with the rights enumerated earlier in the Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle, and Maritain was a major advocate for such a text within UNESCO, in 1947–48, before its adoption by the UN General Assembly, and also in its later advancement.