Charles Malik

Dr. Charles Habib Malik was born in Btourram in the Koura region of northern Lebanon and earned his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University under Alfred North Whitehead, also studying under Martin Heidegger in Germany. He founded the philosophy department at the American University of Beirut before being appointed Lebanon's first ambassador to the United States and the United Nations in 1945.

Malik was one of the pivotal architects of the international human rights system. Serving as Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights alongside Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin, he drafted and championed the preamble and core articles of the historic 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, later serving as President of the UN General Assembly in 1958.