Albert Sherer; Helped to Draft Rights Accords

Albert W. (Bud) Sherer Jr., a career diplomat who led the U.S. delegation during creation of the human-rights agreement that became known as the Helsinki Accords, has died at age 70.

Sherer died Saturday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications following cancer surgery.

In 1974 and 1975, he headed the U.S. team that went first to Geneva and then Helsinki for the 35-nation European Security Conference.

Thirty months of negotiations led to the charter recognizing a European map changed by Soviet annexation and pledging that Soviet-bloc countries would allow a freer flow of information and people across borders. Sherer was given special credit for the human rights provisions of the accords.

Under President Gerald R. Ford, Sherer was a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

His dissenting votes in the Security Council vetoed the admission of Angola to the U.N. as well as a resolution asking Israel to withdraw from all occupied Arab territories by June 1, 1977.

He also called on South Africa in 1976 to end apartheid, saying the policy was “clearly not acceptable under any standard of human rights.”

Sherer joined the State Department in 1946 and served there 33 years. He was assigned, at various times, to Morocco, Hungary, Washington, Czechoslovakia and Poland. He was expelled from Hungary in 1951 as a “spy” at a time when East-West relations were at their bitterest.

He left the foreign service in 1978 and at his death was working with children in trouble with the law through the Northwestern University Legal Clinic.