U.S. Urges Soviets to Move Faster on Human Rights

The 35-nation conference reviewing the Helsinki agreements on European security and cooperation recessed Friday for the summer, with the United States warning the Soviet Union that unless there is a significant improvement in its human rights record, the conference cannot succeed.

Addressing the final plenary meeting of the conference, which has been in session here for nine months, U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman cited Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness, and said:

“The true test of glasnost as far as the Vienna meeting is concerned is whether the Soviet Union can continue and increase the positive trends we have observed, and can give them institutional stability.”

Soviet Movement Urged

So far, Zimmerman said, “it is not enough,” and he called for “marked improvement” before there can be any Western agreement to a Soviet proposal for a human rights conference in Moscow two or three years from now.

“We want to see a faster rate of release of political prisoners,” Zimmerman said. “We want an eradication of the problem of reunification of families, of wives joining husbands and children, of refuseniks allowed to leave the Soviet Union to join their parents. We want an increase in the rate of emigration, which is higher than it has been but is lower than it was in the 1970s.

“Why not eliminate the security provision as a bar to emigration, annul those articles in the criminal code which are used for political arrests, close down the police-run psychiatric hospitals that imprison sane but critical individuals and abolish jamming and dismantle the jamming equipment?”

All these things, Zimmerman said, can be done in the months immediately ahead. The review conference can complete its work by the end of the year, he said, “but we are not going to finish with a bad result--we will not end without a satisfactory result and until we get one we will simply go on.”

The American position was supported by the 12-nation European Communities. Danish Ambassador W. Friis Moller said “there has been no response at all (from the Soviet Union) to proposals on human rights” that the communities put forth three months ago.

“We want a balanced result,” he said. “This is a conference about security and cooperation and we recognize the importance of military questions and disarmament but we need progress of real significance. As far as holding a human rights conference in Moscow, the venue is not of primary concern. We want to discuss what a conference can achieve and then discuss where and when to hold it.”

9,000 Have Emigrated

Soviet Ambassador Yuri B. Kashlev, clearly stung by the Western attacks, which he will have to take up with officials in Moscow before the conference is reconvened here in September, accused the United States of posing questions and conditions for a Moscow human rights conference that “smack of an ultimatum” and are “undignified and petty-minded in spirit.”

Reviewing changes that have taken place in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, Kashlev said that more than 9,000 Soviet citizens have emigrated to other countries so far this year. But he said nothing about spouses being reunited, or about dissidents confined to psychiatric hospitals.

Apart from human rights, the major point at issue in Vienna is a new mandate for an East-West conference on “conventional stability in Europe.” Eventually, this conference will replace the moribund talks that have been going on here for 14 years between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact powers on military force reductions.

This new conference on military security, as well as a Moscow human rights conference, is what the Western powers are holding hostage until there is an improvement in the Soviet record on human rights.

In negotiations on the future security talks, the Soviet Union is seeking to include tactical nuclear weapons--those with a range under 300 miles--and nuclear forces along with conventional, or non-nuclear, forces.

Zimmerman told reporters it is “the strong view of all the Western allies that this question should remain outside the negotiations.” The French are particularly adamant in refusing to discuss their nuclear weapons.

“I see no possibility of a compromise on this question,” Zimmerman said. “There is enough to talk about on conventional forces without bringing in the tactical nuclear question.”

Despite this tough talk, Western diplomats at the conference are forecasting at least marginal improvements in the Soviet Union on human rights in the months ahead. The jamming of the British broadcasts and the U.S. Voice of America has stopped, and it is expected that jamming of West German broadcasts may also be stopped.

An increase in the rate of Jewish emigration is considered likely, and it is regarded as probable that the dozen or more remaining problems of separated American and Soviet spouses well be cleared up in the months ahead.