Lowenstein, Allard

Law and Contemporary Problems : a Quarterly Published by the Duke University, School of Law

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The United Nations and the Human Rights Issue

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THE UNITED NATIONS AND THEHUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE*ALLARD LOWENSTEINtI am now the United States Ambassador to the United Nations for SpecialPolitical Affairs. Part of my function in that job is to involve the United Statesmission at the United Nations in the global concerns of the Carter Adminis-tration about repression and injustice. Andrew Young is the central figure inthe world on these questions. It is extraordinary that the United States is rep-resented by Young because the various facets of the struggle for humanrights in this country are reflected in his life. He worked with the Rev. MartinLuther King, which means that he is a link to the central figure of our gener-ation in the struggle for racial justice, but beyond that particular associationhe has the extraordinary capacity to be overwhelmingly human in a scenewhere that is unheard of. For the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt repre-sented the United States at the United Nations, an American is the centralfigure of the nerve center of our effort to promote human rights-that is toreduce suffering-in the world. That is the central fact about Andrew Youngrepresenting us at the United Nations. It is profitable for us as a nation andfor that effort to have him there. He is both symbol and leader, inspiringthose who work to speed the realization of Martin Luther King's dream. Peri-odic disagreement about specific views or statements is a small price to payfor the great benefits that flow from having such a man as our chief repre-sentative at the United Nations.It is easy to remember a time when whatever good motives we had, therewas much that was troubling about how we were using our power in theworld. We were using that power to wipe out villages 10,000 miles awaywhere nobody knew who we were, where they could not have hurt us if theyhad wanted to. We were instrumental in keeping governments in power thatstayed in power by oppressing their own people-a state of affairs somehowconfused with protecting our own national security. If you measure thesechanges in atmosphere and direction fairly, the Carter Administration hasdone a lot in a short time, and countless human beings who were born into alife of difficulty and struggle are the better for it.* Lecture at the Symposium, Protecting the Right to Dissent, Duke University School of Law, Feb-ruary 24-25, 1978, published posthumously.t Mr. Lowenstein was a practicing attorney in New York City and former U.S. Ambassador tothe United Nations for Special Political Affairs and United States Representative to the U.N.Commission on Human Rights and Trusteeship Council.Page 268: Spring 1979]It is a rare opportunity when the country with the greatest resources inthe world, the greatest power, the greatest sense of what right is about, givespeople the responsibility and power to try to do the things which we have al-ways wanted to do and said that we cared about doing. It does not seem justi-fiable to me or even understandable that the communities most conscientiousabout these questions are least active and least concerned, are inclined toquibble and to argue.I think we should be upset about the relationship with the Shah. I thinkwe should be concerned about what we are doing about the Philippines. Ithink there is plenty of ground for public pressure on the U.S. governmentto do better things in many countries. The world has central questions thatought to be addressed. One of them, of course, is the right to dissent. I thinkone of them is the right of the planet to survive. One of [our] great para-doxes is that, for the first time since Cain killed Abel, we can now wipe outhalf the earth's population in five minutes; we must figure out a way to getpast wars as an instrument to settle differences. That is a factor that I do notthink most people have accepted yet. Certainly most military people have not.There is an extraordinary notion that war is still the way to continue foreignpolicy when you cannot figure out what else to do.The limits imposed by the reality of weaponry and technology must begestated into the kind of policy decisions that people make. What can you doabout eastern Europe? What can you do about China? Not the same thingyou could do if you think of war as a tactic that makes sense. We must devisea way to achieve human rights peacefully.I think the Carter Administration, beginning with the President's remarkswhen he took office, is trying to undo the long, difficult period that we expe-rienced under preceding presidencies. The President has made guidelinesavailable to people who care about decreasing suffering wherever they maylive, whatever the cost to tradition may be, and whatever the source of suffer-ing. We are clear about where we stand and what we want to do. The Presi-dent dispatches people around the world to talk about human rights. This isunprecedented. We go to these countries, whether it is Andrew Young, PatDarian, Mark Schneider or [myself] and there is no question about why we arethere or what we care about. There is no question that what we are saying topeople in those countries has to do with decreasing suffering. We are not con-cerned with more effective armaments to stop another country from ad-vancing or treaties to guard borders. We are concerned with what we will docooperatively to make life less difficult for everyone.Governments are not and should not be all-powerful. There are limits onwhat governments can do. Since so much suffering comes from governments,governments ought to be the source of some of the effort to change that suf-fering. That is what we are trying to achieve. In many places the change ismeasurable in the climate of a country. It is measurable because governmentsTHE UNITED NATIONSLAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMShave a different understanding now-the same governments that used to un-derstand that if you want to make the United States happy (which govern-ments do) you should be anticommunist, you should be repressive if you havedissent from the left, you should do things that are consistent with the wishesof the American government.President Carter appointed me to be a representative at the Geneva hu-man rights session. My instructions were, "to do what you think is right." Idid not understand what a valuable piece of instruction that was or howunique it was. The first thing I did in Geneva was to talk, just talk; not recitethe choreographs that were mailed out; not limit what I said to what hadbeen approved by the committee.If you talk, you run the risk of saying something wrong. You may be mis-interpreted. If you make a mistake, you say so. It does not denigrate thevalue of your country. It simply means that you have enough sense to knowthat nobody is perfect, not even you. You proceed with the understandingthat that is part of the process of dialogue. Everyone is accustomed to havingeverything read from prepared texts which are mimeographed and distrib-uted; everybody knows exactly what is going to be said. If you talk without aprepared text, they listen.The first thing I talked about in Geneva was what I considered the atro-cious resolution on the Middle East concerning the Israelis being torturers,murderers and aggressors. I proposed a new text on human rights in the Mid-dle East, showed it to the Arab countries and they did not want to talk aboutit. I moved that we delete the objectionable part of the resolution and proceedto the next part. The Syrian ambassador told me that Israel is an aggressorbecause of a General Assembly resolution that says that if you occupy a terri-tory, you are an aggressor. It troubled me that, if that is the test, the UnitedStates, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France and others whooccupied any part of Germany, Italy or Japan after World War II are ag-gressors. It was not clear if that resolution meant that a country is an aggres-sor if they occupy territory before or after a peace treaty, in violation of thattreaty. We lost the vote on my resolution. We did not expect to win it. Whatwas fascinating about it was that, before we were through, an open discussiondeveloped. The Egyptian ambassador, an estimable character, was involved.In that session of the Human Rights Commission, we voted on humanrights issues where you could not predict the outcome in advance. Countriesdid not vote predictably in blocks on questions where that had been the casein the past. If you vote in blocks, you do not discuss issues intelligently be-cause it is polemicized. We talked about dissent in the Soviet Union; we in-sisted that we discuss the arrests of Orlov, Ginsberg and others who weremonitoring the Helsinki Final Act. We had a new enthusiasm for voting fromcountries and delegates.[Vol. 43, No. 2Page 268: Spring 1979]The most extraordinary event in Geneva was not that we insisted on dis-cussing the arrests of Orlov and Ginsberg, but that when the Russians madean effort to block that discussion, not a single developing country voted withthem. I believe the reason that happened was that there was a sense in theCommission that something more than polemicized confrontation or tired re-petitive rhetoric was involved. We were saying that we care universally aboutthese questions and we want to talk about them. We want to talk about themwherever they may be a problem, including our own country.At the Human Rights Commission I said that I represented the peoplethat had given the world perhaps the most electrifying battle cry for humanrights in all history: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed bytheir Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty andthe pursuit of happiness. I said, "We gave that battlecry to the world while wehad slavery." Any government that does not understand that it comes to thismeeting with its bag of glories and promises, tragedies and hopes does notunderstand itself and cannot possibly participate usefully in a discussion abouthow we can help each other to solve the problems of human rights.The U.N. president said that no government that ratified the U.N. Chartercan ever insist that what it does with its own people is exclusively its own af-fair. If you cannot talk about human rights in a country, you cannot talkabout human beings. That view prevails not just in the Soviet Union, but inthe United States on the problems of people in southern Africa and LatinAmerica. Every night in Geneva at 11:00 PM we had an open house for any-body who wanted to come and complain about the human rights problems.Those sessions were quite remarkable considering who came to talk to us: thepeople, the information, the suffering. Some governments did not like itwhen we met with people in exile from their country.Some people think that the Carter Administration retreats on the issue ofhuman rights in eastern European countries. I know that in Belgrade, Ambas-sador Goldberg not only insisted on discussing specific cases, but he insistedthat that topic must be the major agenda item of the reviewing conference.When I was in Poland, the President of that country had been involved indiscussing the human rights problems. The Polish government informed methat it did not want me to speak to the Catholic Intellectual Club. This wasnot a revolutionary society trying to overthrow the government, this was anauthorized Polish group. I told the government that I would speak to every-one on the schedule or no one. We had the meetings in Warsaw. I told the Cath-olic Intellectual Club that I was there in keeping with President Carter'spromise that he would try to respond to the future needs of the Polish people.We had an extraordinary session discussing the complexity of human rightsin Poland.When people say there is a retreat from these concerns, what they areTHE UNITED NATIONSLAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMSdoing is accepting the impressions created by what is considered major news.That is a proper part of democracy, but it is not a proper part of objective as-sessment. There has never been a U.S. ambassador who went to Poland andtalked to groups that the Polish government considered objectionable. Wehave never had an ambassador to Belgrade who insisted on discussing humanrights in the eastern countries over the objection of those countries.The Argentine government protested that we were seeing terrible trouble-makers, communists and Che Guevarra's grandmother. I was trying to thinkhow to deal with this protest and this new arsenal of diplomatic weaponrythat we had been given. I did not realize the impact it would have, butI knew we had a new weapon when they protested. I used it with the diplo-matic skill that I had acquired. I declined a dinner invitation to the Argentineambassador's residence. I said that I was not coming; that if the choice wastalking to the Argentine government or the exiles, I would talk with the ex-iles. For three or four days it was a confrontation of will. Could the UnitedStates refuse dinner at the Argentine ambassador's house? What would hap-pen? They invited me to lunch. We talked about los desaparecidos. I do notknow if it decreased the number of people that disappeared in Argentina, butit certainly made clear our concern for real people who suffer in real places.What we made clear in Geneva-and I think this is central to understand-ing what this conference is about-is that we do not sit as nationals, but aspeople. I remember when Zaran, the Russian ambassador in Geneva, gotagitated when we discussed the arrests in the Soviet Union . . . that he an-nounced we were ending detente, we were resuming the Cold War. It seemedto me that if we could sit in Geneva and start the Cold War again, the detentewas rather fragile. I believed that we could survive the discussion of humanrights in the Soviet Union and that detente would survive.In the course of the argument about whether we could discuss Russian in-ternal affairs, I found that the NAACP had brought a petition to the HumanRights Commission thirty years before claiming that American blacks hadbeen discriminated against and segregated because of their race. The Sovietambassador was very enthusiastic about investigating racism in the UnitedStates. He wanted a commission set up to investigate the Americans rightaway. I said that at the time the Soviet Union took that position, Mrs. EleanorRoosevelt was the United States representative and Chairwoman of the Com-mission. Thirty years ago, Mrs. Roosevelt said that people anywhere in theworld that feel their human rights have been violated need to have a place togo and get a hearing. If they come in the right procedure, the Human RightsCommision of the United Nations is the right place to come.In thirty years since that time we have learned a great deal about ourshortcomings. We have moved in the right direction concerning racial rela-tions; we have a long way to go. One reason we have moved is that the worldhas focused on us. Talking about equal justice under the law, they want to[Vol. 43, No. 2Page 268: Spring 1979]know about the Wilmington Ten. Talk about any subject, and people will say,"Wait a minute. Here's what you say, what are you doing?" Thanks to exter-nal (and internal) pressure, we have progressed more than we would haveotherwise..I am trying to convey to this conference what seems to me to be a centralfact of the moment. It is a unique moment at which, through a dozen immi-nent potential catastrophes, we could cease to exit as a planet. We must dealwith that. It is a moment when we could waste the fragile and importantsense of goodwill toward our country that has begun to develop again, andwaste it because we do not understand the opportunity it represents. It is amoment in which the potential for human action across borders, across races,across regions, is higher than it has ever been in most places-southernAfrica, the Middle East, Latin America.I hope that in that sense of opportunity, that sense of potential, people donot relegate everything to government. What can the United States do aboutUganda? We are not going back into the business of destabilizing countries orsending in troops when we do not like what they are doing. We have no am-bassador there. We have no program of assistance to Uganda. People coulddo more. Why isn't there an organized boycott of Ugandan coffee by humanbeings who care about justice and equality? I do not understand the somno-lence of the community in general on questions of compassion.The progress in this community, the changes in our lifetime, for the betterin some places, for the worse in others, indicate precisely how much we caninfluence events at the junctions where events are influenceable. We are atone of those junctions now, this lobotomized state of affairs where half yourhead knows that the world may end in thirty years and the other half acts likeeverything is the same because no one sees that they have any responsibility.That has to be dealt with as part of the effort to relate usefully to the worldas it is. Central to that is the issue of how to decrease human suffering. If wedo not deal with that problem with the breakthroughs that we have, thosebreakthroughs could turn and destroy us.I will finish by resurrecting a statement that was uttered almost ten yearsago about the things that I have talked about. On the day of the murder ofMartin Luther King, Robert Kennedy talked about violence and said this:There's another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly. Destructive as theshot or the bomb in the night. [T]hat is the violence of institutions-indif-ference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poorand that poisons relations between men because their skin is different colors.This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger in schools without books andhomes without heat in the winter, until we learn at last to look at our brothersas aliens, men with whom we share a city but not a community, men bound tous in common dwelling but not in common effort. And then we learn to shareonly a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only acommon impulse to meet disagreement with force. What we need is not divi-sion or hatred or violence or lawlessness but love and wisdom and compassionTHE UNITED NATIONS274 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 43, No. 2toward one another and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer,whether they be white or black. My favorite poet was Aeschylus who wrote,"In our heart, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop until in ourown despair and against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace ofGod." So let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many yearsago, "Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world."That is the essence of human rights.

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