The Dilemma Of Human Rights

The Dilemma Of Human Rights - 1978 Editorial
By Lindsey Williams

October 11, 1978

If only we will back off a little more on our demands that Russia live up to the Helsinki agreement on human rights, a strategic arms limitation treaty can be signed any day now.

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has given away the B-1 bomber, cruise missile, neutron war head and nuclear carrier. Now that all U.S. weapons advantages have been abandoned, the principle broadly defined as human rights is under final attack.

In the end we can expect that the noble precepts of human rights will be accorded short shrift.

Perhaps our retreat from principle is inevitable. Human rights is, after all, a campaign catch-word that greatly complicates the real world of power politics if taken seriously.

Other nations, friends and foes, had difficulty figuring out what we meant by human rights. Not until President Jimmy Carter defined the term more precisely - in private - and turned down the volume did our international relations smooth out.

The trouble was - and still remains for the American public - that "human rights" has too many meanings. Each hearer interprets the concept to suit his own convictions.

Irving Kristol, professor of urban values at New York University, summarized the problem some time ago in a guest analysis for the Wall Street Journal.

"Human rights really includes four very different political ideas," said Kristol.

"HUMAN RIGHTS PROPER is the least political of the four meanings, since it applies equally to all governments, regardless of their political structure. It refers to those practices of government which, in the perspective of our Judaeo-Christian civilization, can flatly be called abominations, that is, where questions of degree are irrelevant. Genocide, whether on a large scale or small, is such an abomination. So is torture. And so are restrictions on the right to emigrate.