Helsinki in Paris
KOREY, WILLIAM
UPGRADING HUMAN RIGHTS Helsinki in Paris BY WILLIAM KOREY Never in the nearly 15-year-old Helsinki process had a meeting on human rights violations been held where the Soviet Union was not...
...While the Soviets did not meet the July 19 compliance deadline, there is a good chance they will act before Copenhagen to assure the holding of the 1991 Human Dimension Conference in Moscow...
...The second task of the Paris conference was to broadly review adherence to Helsinki human rights obligations, especially those adopted at Vienna...
...Last February London used it in the case of Georgi Samoilovich, a 67-year-old Soviet mathematician who had been denied an exit visa for over 10 years...
...The persistent presence of the Berlin Wall and incidents of sentries shooting at East Germans trying to escape to the West drew some fire as well, and served as a grim reminder to all of a still-severed Europe that the Helsinki process had been intended to at least partially reunite...
...Yet that is precisely what happened in Paris at the May 31 -June 23 first annual Human Dimension Conference—the new layer of vigilance added to the regular review meetings that take place every three years...
...Recent developments in Poland and Hungary, in particular those relating to elections and pluralist trends, produced warm comments from the leading Western powers...
...It was too early for the participants in the Paris talks to produce a detailed analysis that might improve the procedure...
...Most egregious was Romania's ruthless cultural and linguistic repression of Hungarians in Transylvania, carried out by means of a brutal wholesale reorganization of rural communities...
...The country accused of a violation must not only be willing to accept the allegation...
...This does not mean the Soviet Union is now considered in the same category as Poland and Hungary, countries moving in the direction of pluralism, alternative parties and free elections...
...If the proposals put forward are ultimately adopted, the central aspirations of the early Western Helsinki advocates will have been fulfilled...
...They prohibit the "discrediting" of "public" institutions and, not surprisingly, aroused furious opposition among Western and glasnost-supporting delegations...
...In the meantime, Western representatives placed some of their hopes on another American initiative and on a stipulation of the Vienna Concluding Document...
...Ambassador Abram put the issue in figurative yet decidedly blunt language: "You can't have Vienna à la carte...
...His refusenik status became seriously complicated when he developed lymphatic cancer...
...That resulted in the flight of thousands of Hungarians...
...In addition, the Kremlin eventually permitted several prominent Soviet Jewish activists to fly under its auspices to Paris for meetings with Western Jewish organizations and the Western press...
...Several hundred such cases were presented...
...Having learned that highly advanced treatment for his illness was available at London's Royal Marsden Hospital, Samoilovich sought to obtain it by making the appropriate official exit visa application...
...To halt the exodus, Bucharest erected a wire barrier on the border it shares with its Communist neighbor...
...As the Paris meeting entered its final week, concerns expressed over the true extent of Soviet progress on human rights and the nature of the Kremlin's intentions were also being articulated in London by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Andrei D. Sakharov...
...Holding "rhetoric to account" was the way President François Mitterrand put it in his welcoming address...
...But Western delegates in Paris were not about to drop their guard, even if the Soviet Union was no longer the chief bogeyman in the Helsinki process...
...In a lecture at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Sakharov asserted that "the only real political change that has taken place in the [USSR] was that we got a man standing at the head of the Government who enjoys practically unlimited power...
...After extensive discussion, it was decided to assign them to the Copenhagen meeting for final action...
...Following a demonstration by the Turks for their rights, Sofia ordered massive expulsions of the beleaguered minority from Bulgarian soil...
...Greater efforts were promised in the areas of legal revision (50 new laws were projected), enlightenment and humanitarianism...
...Bulgaria, too, was vehemently criticized by the West—this time without Soviet bloc support—for the cruel cultural and religious suppression of its Turkish minority...
...Under this new procedure, any Helsinki signatory can bring a complaint against another one directly...
...Because the Vienna Concluding Document was accepted by consensus, he argued, choosing to disregard a part of it was technically unacceptable...
...The next one will be held in Copenhagen in 1990, followed by Moscow in 1991...
...It was hardly accidental that the USSR's public posture in Paris assumed a remarkable air of warmth and cooperation...
...Even the Soviet Union joined Hungary and the West in registering outrage at this surprising variation on the Berlin Wall, marking the first time in Helsinki history that the USSR has publicly chastised a Warsaw Pact ally...
...The Human Dimension Conference scheduled to take place in Mosco w two years fromnowhasahighly important symbolic value for the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin wanted to convince Western nations that their lingering fears and doubts about the Conference's 1991 location were unwarranted...
...Western diplomatic strategy was still a balance between recognizing and welcoming the progress that has been made in the USSR—"the iron curtain is melting at the edges," declared Ambassador Abram—and exerting continued pressure for further reforms...
...But bythetimeof the second Human Dimension Conference in Copenhagen next year, enough experience will have been accumulated to judge whether further fine tuning is necessary...
...Nicolae Ceausescu's regime has simply refused to acknowledge any charges, recalling that at Vienna its representative had announced that his country would not be bound by the new enforcement method...
...If there was a certain responsiveness by the USSR and Czechoslovakia to the procedure, there was none by the regime that has had the largest number of complaints lodged against it: Romania...
...Humanitarianism may not have been "bustin' out all over" this June in Paris...
...He subsequently was informed that he could remain there, and after some delay his family was allowed to join him...
...Although onlyinoperation since midJanuary, the mechanism has already yielded favorable results in two critical instances...
...With the Paris meeting approaching, Prague decided to release Havel four months before his sentence was to have ended...
...The climax of this fanatic Bulgarian nationalist drive virtually coincided with the Paris meeting...
...Especially important was a joint Austrian-Hungarian call for the abolition of all exitvisas...
...Thus, the new legal statutes that have replaced the notorious Articles 70 and 190-1 of the Russian Republic's Criminal Code—which allowed punitive action against anyone promulgating socalled anti-Soviet propaganda—were themselves exposed in Paris as threats to free expression...
...delegation, could comment, "The atmosphere in this room—focused on the advancement of human norms—is more generally favorable than I have experienced in 25 years...
...Protests were made against Prague's incarceration of Charter 77 members and its arrests of street demonstrators...
...At the start of the talks, the Soviet delegation held an open press conference and answered every kind of question...
...The second case involved the distinguished Czech dramatist Vaclav Havel, who had been sentenced on February 21 to one year in prison for participating in an "illegal" demonstration (shortly afterward the sentence was reduced to eight months...
...TheU.S...
...But the general atmosphere at the Helsinki sessions, and the tentative steps taken, justify a certain optimism about the ongoing process...
...Western appraisal of Soviet human rights fell squarely between the negative and the positive...
...Theothermembers are then to be advised of the status of the complaint...
...Again the new mechanism worked...
...While the USSR was lauded for the reforms it has instituted as part of glasnost and perestroika—freer elections...
...an avowed commitment to legality—it continued to be sharply challenged on several key issues...
...The United States, for example, noted some 1,200 unresolved Romanian cases involving divided families...
...On the question of the right of people to move freely across borders, the United States, Great Britain and Canada focused attention on how the Soviets were using the alleged possession of "state secrets" in a cruelly arbitrary way to prevent emigration...
...Just as projecting a spirit of affability and conciliation was the tack the Soviet delegation took in public, the speeches it made in the plenary sessions emphasized the new trends in the USSR and sought to assure everyone that the complaints raised about specific Soviet policies would be satisfactorily handled in time...
...Moreover, easing international anxieties about Soviet goals is one of the main objectives of Gorbachev's "new thinking...
...Compared with the outcry against Romania and the condemnation of Bulgaria, criticism in Paris of Czechoslovakia and East Germany was fairly muted...
...Some 35 proposals were placed on the table in Paris...
...Against a backdrop of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution and the historic Declaration of the Rights of Man, not the USSR, but first Romania, then Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany were declared the chief human rights transgressors in the Communist world...
...pointed out, had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion in every other Warsaw Pact country...
...As many as 50,000 people were forced across the Bulgarian-Turkish border during the Human Dimension Conference, an unhappy commentary on just how seriously Sofia took the Helsinki deliberations...
...William Korey, director of International Policy Research for B'nai ?'rith, is currently preparing a study on "U.S...
...The overwhelming majority of such cases, the U.S...
...The initial matter at hand was the evaluation of an extraordinary mechanism designed in Vienna to help enforce compliance with the significant human rights decisions taken there...
...The Vienna directive required the Helsinki signatories to " find solutions as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within six months, " for all "outstanding" travel and emigration applications...
...it is also obliged to engage in bilateral negotiationswithitsaccuser...
...Inevitably, Romania once more became the focus of widespread criticism...
...Since the new mechanism's adoption six months ago, a total of 24 cases have been filed, four of them by the United States...
...an increasing rate of emigration for Jews, Germans, Armenians and Pentecostals...
...That this stance violates the Helsinki process was repeatedly made clear in Paris...
...Nonetheless, talented hard-line Ambassador Morris Abram, head of the U.S...
...To better respond to adverse criticism, the Kremlin mounted an extraordinary public relations campaign in Paris...
...He expressed dismay at the "Gorby fever" that had seized West Germany (calling it "unjustified and dangerous'), and appeared to be warning that much of what has been reconstructed in the Soviet Union remains a kind of "Potemkin Village...
...delegation had stressed the need for free elections in a pluralist setting—a goad Moscow seemingly will have to respond to in some fashion, given the way it touted its new election procedures in Paris...
...Whether the issue was emigration, ethnic-cultural or religious rights, the Ceausescu regime was seen as engaging in a consistent pattern of gross violations...
...The Soviet leader and his associates obviously did not want to undermine their friendly relationship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for that afternoon Samoilovich was quickly given permission to go to England...
...UPGRADING HUMAN RIGHTS Helsinki in Paris BY WILLIAM KOREY Never in the nearly 15-year-old Helsinki process had a meeting on human rights violations been held where the Soviet Union was not the principal Western target...
...On April 3, CSCE specialists in the British Foreign Ministry pointedly reminded their counterparts in Moscow of the unresolved case just as Mikhail S. Gorbachev was about to visit Whitehall...
...Great Britain, the United States and the European Community all formally complained to the Czech authorities...
...Unresolved charges can be brought before annual Human Dimension Conferences...
...The Paris talks were convened to follow up in two ways on agreements reached by the 35-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at a path-breaking meeting in Vienna that ended last January (see "Advancing the Helsinki Process," NL, February 6...
...Hereceived no answer from the Soviet authorities...
...Conference participants had been flooded with documentation about refuseniks like Emmanuel Lurie, a chemist who last did classified work 25 years ago, and Vladimir Raiz, a molecular biologist who left his job 24 years ago...
...Indeed, the kudos almost suggested that these two countries had come to be regarded as quasi-democratic allies...
...Theprovision'sparticular dual sponsorship was itself significant—and much of the language came from an American draft...
...Since 1984, the country's 1.5 million Turks have been compelled to slavicize their names and those of their streets and towns...
...Policy and the Helsinki Process" under a Ford Foundation grant...
...The delegation it sent to the talks was twice the size of anyone else's—a unique development in the Helsinki process—and included "human rights" and emigration officials who were available to talk with all nongovernmental lobbyists and individual activists...
Vol. 72 • July 1989 • No. 11
