Helsinki and human rights.

• Author: Richmond, Yale

The participating States ... Make it their aim to facilitate freer movement and contacts, individually and collectively, whether privately or officially, among persons, institutions and organizations of the participating States, and to contribute to the solution of the humanitarian problems that arise in that connexion ...

--Helsinki Final Act.

The 1975 signing in Helsinki by thirty-three European heads of state or government, as well as the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of the United States, evoked considerable debate and drama. Not since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which redrew the map of Europe and established a peace that lasted forty years, had so many European leaders assembled to put their pens to a paper outlining future relations between their states. Although not a treaty and not legally binding, the Helsinki Final Act, as the concluding document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation In Europe (CSCE) is known, was a political statement that its signatories pledged to observe.

The Final Act recognized, for the first time in an international agreement, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freer movement of people, ideas, and information. That recognition was to produce profound change in the Soviet Union.

A European security conference had been proposed by the Soviets in 1954 as surrogate for a World War II peace treaty. Soviet motives were obvious--recognition of post-war borders in Europe (especially Poland's borders with the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union), cooperation among European states, reduction of armaments, and removal of foreign (i.e. US) troops from Europe. Under the Soviet proposal, the United States and Canada would have been excluded from the conference.

The Europeans--the neutrals and non-aligned, as well as NATO members--were interested in such a conference, tempted as they were by the prospects for peace and stability in Europe, as well as increased East-West trade. The NATO nations, however, stipulated that their non-European allies, the United States and Canada, must also participate in the conference. In addition, as the preliminary political positioning evolved in the late 1960s, the West Europeans insisted that the conference should also discuss fundamental human rights, including the freer movement of people, ideas, and information.

US reaction to the conference proposal, however, was decidedly cool. Henry Kissinger, as National Security...