Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 on 10 December 1948 in Palais de Chaillot, Paris, as the third United Nations General Assembly was held there . Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favour, none against, eight abstained and Honduras and Yemen failed to vote or abstain.
Humanist photography
At the end of World War II, in 1946, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux embraced humanism; Sartre arguing that existentialism was a humanism entailing freedom of choice and a responsibility for defining oneself, while at the Sorbonne in an address sponsored by UNESCO, Malraux depicted human culture as 'humanisme tragique', a battle against biological decay and historical disaster. Emerging from brutal global conflict, survivors desired material and cultural reconstruction and the appeal of humanism was a return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance symbolised in an international proclamation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on 10 December 1948. That the photographic image could become a universal language in accord with these principles was a notion circulated at a UNESCO conference in 1958