P. C. Chang
On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafting committee, he served both as an effective Asian delegate and also as a mediator when the negotiations reached a stalemate. He served as Vice-Chairman of the original UN Commission on Human Rights and Republic of China delegate to committee and played a pivotal role in its drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948. He and fellow delegate Charles Malik, the Lebanese philosopher-diplomat, shared ideals of universal human rights, but debated what they were and how they could be described in an international document. By most accounts, Chang and Malik were the philosophical leaders of the deliberations. Chang argued that the modern world should pay heed to Chinese philosophers such as Mencius not because they were Chinese, but because their ideas had universal validity.
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