The Carter Revival
When Jimmy Carter became president of the United States in 1977, he raised the profile of human rights as an international issue.
Carter made the theme of universal rights a priority for American foreign policy, encouraging the advocates of human rights throughout the world. Carter attempted to disentangle international human rights from the East-West politics of the Cold War and from North-South arguments between the industrialized and nonindustrialized countries over economic matters. This gave new momentum and increased legitimacy to human rights organizations everywhere.
The Helsinki Process
The mid-1970s also saw the introduction of human rights into the mainstream of multilateral and bilateral foreign policy. The United States and European countries began to consider human rights practices in their aid policies. And the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 explicitly introduced human rights into the mainstream of U.S.-Soviet relations.
The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) began in the early 1970s as a series of talks involving the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and almost all the countries of Europe. Discussions focused on resolving issues between the Communist East and democratic West.
The CSCE’s final act, reached in 1975 in Helsinki, Finland, and signed by 35 countries, became known as the Helsinki Accords. The accords cited 10 specific principles, including respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms such as freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief.
Many experts credit the Helsinki process with helping to bring about the fall of Communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. By the end of the 1980s the Cold War had come to an end, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin.
The CSCE, which up to this point had convened meetings and conferences, now took on a greater role-managing the historic change taking place in Europe. Its name changed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It is now the largest regional security organization in the world, comprising 56 countries from Europe, Central Asia, and North America. It also has partner states in Asia and the Mediterranean region.
Many people see the OSCE as a prototype for other regional cooperative efforts to forge greater respect for human rights in other parts of the world. The Copenhagen Declaration and the Paris Principles of the OSCE have become enormously influential as a measure for human rights performance, including the record of democratic states. Within the United Nations, a revitalized Commission on Human Rights, led by Canada, The Netherlands, and others, formulated new treaties on women’s rights (1979), torture (1984), and the rights of the child (1989). Experts were appointed to study and report on human rights violations in a growing number of countries. By the mid-1980s, most Western countries agreed that human rights should be an active concern of foreign policy, and turned to the issues of monitoring and enforcement.
The 1970s was also the decade in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with human rights emerged as a notable international political force. This was symbolized by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International in 1977 for its assistance to political prisoners. By 1980, there were some 200 NGOs in the United States that dealt with human rights, and about the same number in Great Britain. The emergence of NGOs in the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America has been an equally important development. These groups, in addition to their advocacy for victims of human rights abuses, have been important in influencing national and international human rights policies.
