U.S. Lawmakers Hail Rights Gains : Vienna Conference Draws Praise From Watchdog Group

U.S. congressional monitors Monday praised the just-concluded European security and human rights conference for strengthening moral standards against political and religious repression.

“The most optimistic of us in November, 1986 (when the conference began), would not have anticipated the progress that has been made,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told a press conference.

Hoyer, chairman of the congressional watchdog committee, is in Vienna to attend the ceremonial close of the conference, a follow-up meeting to the historic European security conference that ended in Helsinki in 1975.

The United States, Canada, the Soviet Union and 32 other European nations, both East and West, are participating in the meeting.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, making his last foreign trip before yielding the office to his designated successor, James A. Baker III, will outline the official U.S. position today. He plans to return to Washington shortly after the speech, without waiting for the conference’s conclusion Thursday.

No Meeting With Soviet

By leaving so quickly, Shultz apparently will miss the opportunity to hold a final meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who is not scheduled to arrive in Vienna until Wednesday. Shultz and Shevardnadze met 31 times in less than four years, setting the agenda for arms control and a historic relaxation in the superpower relationship.

Reflecting on his six-year diplomatic tenure, Shultz said he is proudest of the advances in human rights around the world that he said were due, at least in part, to American pressure.

“These things that have a human scale to them, I think . . . are the ones that you get the deepest good feeling about,” he told reporters on the flight from Washington.

“I think the most frustrating area for us has been Central America and Panama,” he added. “There has been the emergence of a bipartisan consensus on many aspects of what should be done, but not on Nicaragua. And we’ve paid a considerable penalty because we haven’t been able to get that.

“On (Panamanian strongman Manuel A.) Noriega, of course, there isn’t any disagreement about what ought to happen . . . but it is not so easy to get it to happen,” he said.

Washington has been seeking unsuccessfully to force out Noriega after his indictment in Florida on drug trafficking charges.

The Vienna meeting, officially known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, has set the stage for a new round of talks on reducing tanks, artillery and other non-nuclear weapons in Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union. The negotiations--somewhat whimsically titled the CAFE talks, an acronym for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe--will begin March 9 in Vienna, possibly the cafe capital of the world.

In the field of human rights, the conference that is winding up here adopted new standards for religious tolerance, treatment of national minorities and the free exchange of information and ideas. It also called for the release of political prisoners and, for the first time, sought to guarantee for all people the right to leave, and return to, their homeland.

Shultz said the sections on human rights “are the best words we have had” in any international agreement on the subject.

The congressional monitors echoed that upbeat assessment.

“Will the promises of the document be kept?” Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.) asked rhetorically. “We can’t answer that, but these words are more precise than anything we have had before.”

At about the time the Vienna conference was completing its work, there were ominous implications that words alone are not enough. On Sunday and Monday, police in Czechoslovakia harshly suppressed political demonstrations. East Germany suppressed a demonstration on Sunday.

Hoyer called the action of the police in Prague “a gross contradiction” of the Vienna agreements.

“The fact of international life is that . . . incidents like this continue to occur,” Hoyer said.

McClure said, however, that the new Vienna document “will make it more difficult for the Czech and East German authorities” to dismiss international criticism of political repression as interference in internal affairs.

A Standard for Judgment

“The fact that they have signed this document provides a standard by which their actions can be judged,” McClure said.

The latest conference calls for two follow-up meetings on human rights, one to be held beginning May 30 in Paris and the other in Moscow in 1991.

U.S. agreement to attend the Moscow meeting has been controversial because of the Soviet Union’s checkered record on human rights. However, the Reagan Administration decided to go along with the plan because, officials said, the Soviet performance, although far from perfect, has improved.

Hoyer said he has “reservations” about the Moscow meeting, but he said he will not criticize the Administration’s position. The Soviet Union had said it would not consent to concluding the Vienna conference until all delegations agreed to attend the session in Moscow.

“It’s a judgment call,” Hoyer said. “At some point in time the Vienna review conference had to come to an end. . . . If you ended it three weeks from now, there would still be cases on which people raised questions.”