A Chilly Debut

The new U.S. policy

Striding into Geneva's mustard-colored Palais des Nations to make its debut at the annual session of the 43-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, the crisp new U.S. delegation was received with keen anticipation. The assembled delegates were waiting to hear the first formal expression of the Reagan Administration's sharp break with the Carter human rights policy.

They were not disappointed. Chief Delegate Michael Novak, a neoconservative scholar at Washington's American Enterprise Institute, set out to assure the parley that the U.S. was not about to abandon human rights concerns. Novak made the difference clear: rather than criticizing only rightist regimes for human rights violations--a course the Carter Administration was often accused of following at the expense of U.S. strategic interest--he gave notice that the U.S. would not tolerate the flouting of human rights in Communist regimes. "Abuse of human rights is abominable," Novak declared, "but we want the same standards applied everywhere."

Distinguishing between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, he added: "We tend to spend more time criticizing countries that are partly free, and making progress toward freedom, than those where little freedom exists." Finally, he argued, the greatest violation of human rights is the "new international terrorism, supported by various international networks." Novak concluded by promising the delegates that there would be no zigzagging on human rights by the Reagan Administration.

Lest anyone miss the point, Alternate Delegate Richard Schifter, a Washington attorney, delivered a broadside against the Soviets. Invoking "the lessons of the Hitler era," he charged the Soviets with "thinly veiled antiSemitism" with its attacks on Zionism, and characterized the Soviet Union as a state whose "atheistic doctrine seeks to stamp out all creeds."

Delegates from other nations, accustomed to the commission's verbose and often lengthy wrangling, seemed to enjoy the theater, but many were critical. A number of Western European delegates accused the U.S. of a certain reverse selectivity in the new, professedly evenhanded U.S. approach to human rights. Said one: "I would have liked the U.S. retribution against the Soviets better if it had also included the rightist military dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere." When the U.S. abstained from voting for a Dutch-initiated resolution calling for cessation of all arms traffic into El Salvador and a special U.N. investigation of human rights violations there, the attitude toward the Americans turned distinctly chilly.

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