Human rights and wrongs

From the Journal Sentinel

One of the Carter administration's most valuable achievements was its attempt to give human rights a major place in U.S. foreign policy. Beginning in March 1977, the State Department began making yearly reports on human rights conditions throughout the world, with a view to highlighting the issue.

That first report covered only 82 countries - those receiving U.S. aid; the latest survey, released late last month, covers 195 nations and territories around the world. Private organizations also produce such reviews, but the State Department's effort is uniquely powerful because it is backed by the full weight of a government that represents the world's only superpower.

Cynics and others nevertheless dismiss the annual reports as well-meaning but largely rhetorical exercises. This is untrue; however much dictators and despots condemn the surveys and deny the accusations they contain, they are very sensitive to the publicity generated by the critiques.

Such reports make dictators think twice before routinely torturing, imprisoning, exiling and in other ways abusing dissident intellectuals, religious figures and labor leaders. That is why the reports are welcomed by human rights advocates.

Neither are the surveys a manifestation of cultural imperialism, an ignorant and unfair attempt to impose Western norms on non-Western cultures. The State Department surveys reflect values that have been enshrined in such international documents as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even countries that put up the "cultural imperialism" argument often claim to be "democratic" or "progressive," and they are willing to be judged by the very U.N. charters they deride. For example, just two days after the State Department issued its report and two weeks before an important U.N. human rights conference in Geneva, China ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Those rights are still very much under siege in China, of course. For more than a month, for example, China has imprisoned a U.S. university researcher on the far-fetched claim that she is a spy. On Tuesday, the government claimed the China-born scholar, Gao Zhan, had confessed to her crimes, but it has failed to produce any reliable evidence to support its preposterous allegation. Actually, Gao is lucky; she is legally a permanent U.S. resident. Ordinary Chinese citizens, notably, members of the Falun Gong religious sect, are subject to even greater indignities.

Anachronisms like forced religious conversions and slavery continue to exist in other countries. But in places as different as Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Ghana, Peru and the Korean peninsula, there is hope and progress. For that, the annual State Department human rights reports can claim a measure of credit.

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 30, 2001.

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