Man’s Inhumanity

The Watch Committees on the Americas, Asia and the Helsinki Accord have been doing excellent work keeping track of the state of human rights in countries around the world. Their periodic reports have been melancholy catalogues of mistreatment of human beings by other human beings, leavened too seldom by occasional reports of progress.

Now another associated committee, the Human Rights Watch, has taken a look at what has been happening to the people who monitor human rights in their countries. The account, though not unexpected, is appalling.

Ten human-rights monitors have been murdered in the past year--five of them in Colombia, two in El Salvador. Two more have disappeared.

Hundreds more--hundreds!--in the 39 countries surveyed have been tortured, beaten, jailed, forbidden to practice law and harassed in many other ways.

Human Rights Watch says that its list is not “an index of repressiveness. Some countries--Saudi Arabia and North Korea are examples--are so repressive that, as far as we know, no one is able to engage in any human-rights monitoring; or if anyone does this, no information about their efforts has penetrated their country’s borders.”

Chile, Czechoslovakia, South Africa and the Soviet Union figure importantly in the survey because, Human Rights Watch says, these are countries “in which there are ongoing struggles between important human-rights movements and repressive governments.”

It might be added that in these countries there is some hope that the sufferings of the present are a prelude to more humane societies in the future.

In them and in all the other countries where people abuse one another in the name of religion, ideology, power or greed, the person who says that “it must not be this way” is lonely, frightened and very brave.