THE U.S. COMMITMENT:
HUMAN RIGHTS AND FOREIGN POLICY
By Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.), who served as president of
the United States from January 20, 1977, to January 20, 1981,
made concern for human rights a basic element of the country's
foreign policy. Since leaving the presidency, he has continued to
be a champion of social justice and human rights. In 1986, he
established the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute
dedicated to fighting disease, hunger, poverty, conflict, and
oppression worldwide. He has monitored elections in several
foreign nations, provided mediation efforts in civil wars, and
thrown his support behind international relief operations. Since
1984, Carter and his wife Rosalynn have also given a week of
their time and construction skills each year to build affordable
housing for those in need.
Following are excerpts from Carter's remarks at a White House
meeting commemorating the 30th anniversary of the signing of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1978.
T
his week we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. We rededicate ourselves -- in the
words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the chairperson of the Human
Rights Commission -- to the Universal Declaration as, and I quote
from her, "a common standard of achievement for all peoples of
all nations."
The Universal Declaration and the human rights conventions that
derive from it do not describe the world as it is. But these
documents are very important, nonetheless. They are a beacon,
a guide to a future of personal security, political freedom, and
social justice.
For millions of people around the globe that beacon is still
quite distant, a glimmer of light on a dark horizon of
deprivation and repression. The reports of Amnesty International,
the International Commission of Jurists, the International League
for Human Rights, and many other nongovernmental human rights
organizations amply document the practices and conditions that
destroy the lives and the spirit of countless human beings.
Political killings, tortures, arbitrary and prolonged detention
without trial or without a charge, these are the cruelest and the
ugliest of human rights violations. Of all human rights, the most
basic is to be free of arbitrary violence, whether that violence
comes from government, from terrorists, from criminals, or from
self-appointed messiahs operating under the cover of politics or
religion.
But governments -- because of their power, which is so much
greater than that of an individual -- have a special
responsibility. The first duty of a government is to protect its
own citizens, and when government itself becomes the perpetrator
of arbitrary violence against its citizens, it undermines its own
legitimacy.
There are other violations of the body and the spirit which are
especially destructive of human life. Hunger, disease,
poverty are enemies of human potential which are as relentless as
any repressive government.
The American people want the actions of their government, our
government, both to reduce human suffering and to increase human
freedom. That's why I have sought to rekindle the beacon of human
rights in American foreign policy. Over the last two
years I've tried to express these human concerns as our diplomats
practice their craft and as our nation fulfills its own
international obligations.
We will speak out when individual rights are violated in other
lands. The Universal Declaration means that no nation can draw
the cloak of sovereignty over torture, disappearances, officially
sanctioned bigotry, or the destruction of freedom within its own
borders. The message that is being delivered by our
representatives abroad ... is that the policies regarding human
rights count very much in the character of our own relations with
other individual countries.
A spiritually liberated person standing on the firm ground
of moral principle, and understanding what he is fighting for,
has an inexhaustible reserve of strength.
Natan Sharansky, former Soviet
refusenik and current
Minister of
Trade and Industry, State of Israel, from his memoir Fear No
Evil, 1989
In distributing the scarce resources of our foreign assistance
programs, we demonstrate that our deepest affinities
are with nations which commit themselves to a democratic path to
development. Toward regimes which persist in wholesale violations
of human rights, we will not hesitate to convey our outrage,
nor will we pretend that our relations are unaffected.
The effectiveness of our human rights policy is now an
established fact. It has contributed to an atmosphere of change
-- sometimes disturbing -- but which has encouraged progress in
many ways and in many places. In some countries, political
prisoners have been released by the hundreds, even thousands. In
others, the brutality of repression has been lessened. In still
others there's a movement toward democratic institutions or the
rule of law when these movements were not previously detectable.
To those who doubt the wisdom of our dedication, I say this: Ask
the victims. Ask the exiles. Not a single one of those who is
actually taking risks or suffering for human rights has ever
asked me to desist in our support of basic human rights. From the
prisons, from the camps, from the enforced exiles, we receive one
message: Speak up, persevere, let the voice of freedom be heard.
I'm very proud that our nation stands for more than military
might or political might. It stands for ideals that have their
reflection in the aspirations of peasants in Latin America,
workers in Eastern Europe, students in Africa, and farmers in
Asia.
We do live in a difficult and complicated world, a world in which
peace is literally a matter of survival. Our foreign
policy must take this into account. Often a choice that moves us
toward one goal tends to move us further away from another goal.
Seldom do circumstances permit me or you to take actions that are
wholly satisfactory to everyone.
But I want to stress again that human rights are not peripheral
to the foreign policy of the United States. Our pursuit of human
rights is part of a broad effort to use our great power and our
tremendous influence in the service of creating a better world, a
world in which human beings can live in peace, in freedom, and
with their basic needs adequately met.
Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy. And I say this
with assurance, because human rights is the soul of our sense of
nationhood.
For the most part, other nations are held together by common
racial or ethnic ancestry, or by a common creed or religion, or
by ancient attachments to the land that go back for centuries of
time. Some nations are held together by the forces, implied
forces of a tyrannical government. We are different from all of
those, and I believe that we in our country are more fortunate.
As a people we come from every country and every corner of the
earth. We are of many religions and many creeds. We are of every
race, every color, every ethnic and cultural background. We are
right to be proud of these things and of the richness they lend
to the texture of our national life. But they are not the things
which unite us as a single people.
What unites us -- what makes us Americans -- is a common belief
in peace, in a free society, and a common devotion to the
liberties enshrined in our Constitution. That belief and that
devotion are the sources of our sense of national community.
Uniquely, ours is a nation founded on an idea of human rights.
From our own history we know how powerful that idea can be.
Next week marks another human rights anniversary -- Bill of
Rights Day. Our nation was "conceived in liberty," in Lincoln's
words, but it has taken nearly two centuries for that liberty to
approach maturity.
For most of the first half of our history, black Americans were
denied even the most basic human rights. For most of the first
two-thirds of our history, women were excluded from the political
process. Their rights and those of Native Americans are still not
constitutionally guaranteed and enforced. Even freedom of speech
has been threatened periodically throughout our history. The
struggle for full human rights for all Americans -- black, brown,
and white; male and female; rich and poor -- is far from over.
To me, as to many of you, these are not abstract matters or
ideas. In the rural Georgia country where I grew up, the majority
of my own fellow citizens were denied many, basic rights -- the
right to vote, the right to speak freely without fear, the right
to equal treatment under the law. I saw at first hand the effects
of a system of deprivation of rights. I saw the courage of those
who resisted that system. And finally, I saw the cleansing
energies that were released when my own region of this country
walked out of darkness and into what (former U.S. vice president)
Hubert Humphrey, in the year of the adoption of the Universal
Declaration, called "the bright sunshine of human rights."
The American Bill of Rights is 187 years old, and the struggle to
make it a reality has occupied every one of those
187 years. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is only 30
years old. In the perspective of history, the idea of human
rights has only just been broached.
I do not draw this comparison because I want to counsel patience.
I draw it because I want to emphasize, in spite of
difficulties, steadfastness and commitment.
One hundred and eighty-seven years ago, as far as most Americans
were concerned, the Bill of Rights was a bill of promises. There
was no guarantee that those promises would ever be fulfilled. We
did not realize those promises by waiting for history to take its
inevitable course. We realized them because we struggled. We
realized them because many sacrificed. We
realized them because we persevered.
For millions of people around the world today, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is still only a declaration of hope.
Like all of you, I want that hope to be fulfilled. The struggle
to fulfill it will last longer than the lifetimes of any of us.
Indeed, it will last as long as the lifetime of humanity itself.
But we must persevere.
And we must persevere by ensuring that this country of ours,
leader in the world, which we love so much, is always in the
forefront of those who are struggling for that great hope, the
great dream of universal human rights.
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