Former President’s Wife at Moscow Meeting : Carter Saluted by Soviet Rights Leader

Twelve years after President Jimmy Carter triggered a crisis in Soviet-American relations by making human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy, his wife, Rosalynn, looked on Monday as the head of a year-old Soviet human rights commission praised her husband for having initiated a new era.

The scene was a press conference for leaders of an international citizens’ effort to promote civil liberties through dialogue, and it was timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the late American civil rights leader.

“President Carter was the initiator, I would say, of raising the human rights issue,” said Fyodor Burlatsky, chairman of the unofficial Soviet human rights commission and co-chairman with Mrs. Carter of the East-West Conference on Human Rights.

“This issue was frequently used for confrontation,” Burlatsky said, “but still, the ideals that he proclaimed are very viable.”

The former First Lady said of her husband: “He believed that when the President of our country speaks out for those people around the world who are repressed, it gives them hope. And also, if countries know that to a great extent their relationship with the United States depends on how they treat their people, it makes a difference.

Carter’s ‘Sincere Effort’

“It was a sincere effort,” she continued. “It was criticized a good bit, because it’s very difficult to enforce human rights and demand that countries treat their citizens right. But it led the way for a human rights movement which I think is too strong now to be stopped.”

One of Carter’s first acts after entering the White House in 1977 was to meet with exiled Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an act that underlined his stand on human rights and infuriated the Kremlin, then under the leadership of Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Within weeks the Soviets began a widespread crackdown on all forms of dissent, including the arrest of such prominent human rights campaigners as Natan Sharansky, then known as Anatoly Shcharansky. From that point on, Soviet-American relations were soured for much of the Carter presidency.

Monday’s meeting was the third for the East-West Conference, the first in the Soviet Union. Participants included Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing, wife of the former French president; a member of the British Parliament, a leading Dutch businessman and a Roman Catholic priest.

The group is considered unusual because its members report on human rights problems in their individual countries. But the main topic Monday was clearly the changes in Soviet human rights policies under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

A Long Way to Go

According to the Western participants, the Soviet Union still has a long way to go in this respect, but the changes have created an atmosphere of trust.

“It was a little confrontational in the beginning,” Rosalynn Carter said of the group’s first meeting, about a year ago in the Netherlands. But now, she said, “we know each other, we trust each other.”

Burlatsky, asked to enumerate the main human rights problems remaining in the Soviet Union, emphasized “freedom of conscience.”

“A great deal has been done in this area in practice,” he said. “Now what we need is a clear-cut and defined law that will consolidate and seal off what has been achieved against any relapses of violating people’s freedom of worship.”

Burlatsky, a journalist who has been in the forefront of Gorbachev’s campaign of glasnost , or openness, said the Soviet Human Rights Commission is working for the elimination from the penal code of articles circumscribing the practice of religion. The commission has the government’s blessing but has no official status or power.

Draft of Law on Religion

Burlatsky said that new legislation on religion, which more than a year ago was officially described as in the draft stage, is still a year or more away from being enacted into law.

“I hope this law will be passed this year,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen this year, it will without fail happen next year.”

Meanwhile, Burlatsky said, most of the religious prisoners named on a list handed over by fellow East-West commission members a year ago have reportedly been released. He said he has been told officially that “by the end of last year, neither the prisons nor camps contained a single prisoner who had been tried for (religious) offenses.”

Western members gave him at least three new lists here, he said, although the member of the British Parliament, Patrick Cormack, said that even the independent groups that most closely monitor individual human rights cases are not sure if all the individuals named are still in custody. The lists include about 30 Christians, some Muslims and some Jews who have been refused permission to emigrate.

Burlatsky said it is also necessary to improve Soviet citizens’ means of legally defending all their economic, political, social and civil rights. He said there is a need for an unambiguous law defining the status of about 60,000 unofficial citizens’ groups that have emerged here since Gorbachev took power.

The United States, Rosalynn Carter said, must deal with problems of homelessness, unemployment and racial discrimination. She did not characterize these as human rights problems.