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For two years, they collaborated in the creation of one of the modern world's great documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948.

Humphrey had been teaching, not entirely happily, at McGill University when he seized the UN opportunity. He was an international human rights natural: deeply committed to social change; at ease in French as well as English; and an expert in the way the law worked between nations.

He was bound to be for the underdog. At the age of thirteen months, he had lost his father, and his mother died when he was eleven. In between those calamities came another. A horrible accident took away his left arm.

There were other tragedies, not Humphrey's alone. The Depression made him into a socialist. The Second World War turned his mind, as he wrote, to "the cynical, studied and wholesale violation of human rights in and by Nazi Germany." Unlike any previous conflict, that was "a war to vindicate human rights."

Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the 32nd president of the US and a prominent advocate for liberal causes, was elected chair of the Human Rights Commission in early 1947. She immediately set Humphrey to work on an international bill of rights.

Humphrey and his small New York staff pored over every available source from around the world, compiling what the UN boasted was "the most exhaustive documentation on the subject of human rights ever assembled."

John Humphrey with his collaborator on the Declaration of Human Rights Eleanor Roosevelt.

Then the drafting began. Humphrey found the quiet he needed at the Lido Beach Hotel, where he and his wife were living out of a suitcase. When his version was complete, it listed in plain prose almost 50 political, civil, cultural, economic and social rights and freedoms.

That essential starting point was reached by June 1947. Over the next year, with Humphrey at her side, Mrs. Roosevelt steered the Human Rights Commission to a document that was ready to be sent up the line at the UN's fall meeting in Paris. It was never easy work. There were clashes of personality and philosophy, along with the complications of international politics as the Cold War took shape.

The Canadian government was no admirer of the Commission's labours. Their document was seen as vague, permissive, and in need of further study. It also trampled on the jurisdiction of the provinces. Nor was there much point in telling Canadians what they already knew about human rights and telling the world what much of it would systematically ignore.

So Canada abstained when the declaration came up for approval at the committee stage in Paris.

Next would come the big vote in the General Assembly. Canada's partners in another abstention were expected to be South Africa and the Soviet Union, along with its satellites – "a rather undesirable minority," the delegation at the UN advised.

Retreat was in order. The Cabinet reluctantly allowed its representatives to side with the overwhelming majority of states that voted for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Harvard University professor of law Mary Ann Glendon has written that the declaration "charted a bold new course for human rights by presenting a vision of freedom as linked to social security, balanced by responsibilities, grounded in respect for equal human dignity, and guarded by the rule of law." It affirms "that its rights belong to everybody, everywhere."

Any accounting of the Universal Declaration must take account of its vast influence and imperfect application. There have been impressive advances in human rights, many of which can be linked to the Declaration, and yet serious abuses regularly continue to occur.

It is ultimately up to us, concludes Glendon, whether we build upon or waste the legacy left by Humphrey, Roosevelt and "other large-souled men and women who strove to bring a standard of right from the ashes of terrible wrongs."

Norman Hillmer is Professor of History and International Affairs at Carleton University.