Critics See Nation Switching Roles With Soviets : Own Rights Eroding, Britons Say

One considers itself the fount of liberty; the other was branded not so long ago as an “evil empire.”

But as Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrived in Britain on Wednesday for the third time to hold talks with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it sometimes seems from the headlines as if the two countries have switched roles.

Gorbachev’s efforts to turn around his country’s human rights image have enjoyed what must be considered extraordinary success lately, crowned with the visit to Moscow by a top-level delegation from Amnesty International. Summing up the visit last weekend, Ian Martin, secretary general of the London-based human rights monitoring group, said he is encouraged by improvements in the human rights situation under Gorbachev.

The Kremlin took another step toward burying former President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” epithet Tuesday when it granted permission for Georgy Samoilovich, a 66-year-old Jewish mathematician, to go abroad for cancer treatment. The announcement was seen here as a gesture to a British government that has championed the former Soviet defense industry worker’s case. Samoilovich had been refused permission to leave because he was said to possess state secrets.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of critics charge that Thatcher is presiding over a dangerous erosion of freedoms in the country that gave the world the Magna Charta.

On Wednesday, the International Federation of Journalists condemned the British government for what it called “systematic and extensive” muzzling of the media. “Authoritarian regimes can now point to the British Parliament--’the mother of democracies’--to justify their own much more repressive attitude toward their press and media,” the Brussels-based organization commented in a special report.

And a new charter that has now been signed by nearly 15,000 Britons declares: “We have been brought up in Britain to believe that we are free: that our Parliament is the mother of democracy; that our liberty is the envy of the world; that our system of justice is always fair; that the guardians of our safety, the police and security services, are subject to democratic, legal control; that our civil service is impartial; that our cities and communities maintain a proud identity; that our press is brave and honest. Today, such beliefs are increasingly implausible.”

And a poll conducted for a recent British Broadcasting Corp. television special entitled “How Free Is Britain?” found that by a more than 6-to-1 margin, Britons feel that the power of government has increased more under Thatcher than has individual freedom.

No one here seriously contends that Gorbachev’s Soviet Union has suddenly become more democratic than Thatcher’s Britain.

“This is a much freer country than the U.S.S.R.,” commented Anthony Barnett, coordinator of the Charter 88 campaign for constitutional reform to better guarantee British civil liberties. “But you can say that the political dynamic (in the two countries) is moving in opposite directions.”

Some object that it is a travesty even to draw comparisons between the two nations.

“By God! It’s free, this country!” protested a senior aide to Thatcher. “It’s free! Nobody with any sense takes these things seriously.”

Czech Objects to Name

And a former Czech signatory to the Charter 77 civil rights manifesto protested that it is illegitimate for the British group to imply in its name a non-existent connection between the two situations.

“This is a very different thing,” said Julius Tomin, who immigrated here in 1980. “People here are not oppressed,” he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper. “They are not yet speaking from within some really threatened right. It is more or less an academic exercise.”

More importantly, Britain has competing political parties, relatively unrestricted freedom of expression and a long political tradition of democracy.

What it does not have is a written constitution or Bill of Rights to guarantee those liberties. As a result, according to the critics, they are in constant danger of being eroded.

“If totalitarianism were to come to the British Isles, it would creep over us quietly, in a very English, very reasonable way,” editorialized the New Statesman magazine, which sponsored the Charter 88 movement.

“The enemy of rights in Britain today isn’t tyranny,” commented Ronald Dworkin, an American professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University. “It’s convenience.”

Currently under fire from civil libertarians is a new Official Secrets Act, which would bind members of the security and intelligence services to a lifetime of silence. For those charged with violating the act, it would eliminate the possibility of defending oneself on grounds that there was a compelling public interest that the information be made public.

An effort to amend the bill to allow a public interest defense was defeated in the House of Lords on Monday, a development that Charter 88’s Barnett called “absolutely staggering.” It means, he charged, that “the British upper classes are unwilling to allow a jury to consider the nature of the public interest.”

Home Secretary Douglas Hurd defends the bill as drastically narrowing the scope of official secrets from the previous 1911 law, and he argues that the areas where there is an actual tightening of restrictions are vital for the interests of state.

Meanwhile, the government this week began contempt of court proceedings against three newspapers for printing excerpts of one-time intelligence agent Peter Wright’s best-selling memoirs, “Spycatcher.” It was in part due to its unsuccessful efforts to quash Wright’s book that Downing Street introduced the new official secrets bill.

Thatcher’s government has also come under fire for a number of measures designed to help it combat terrorism in Northern Ireland. One change allows the courts to interpret negatively the act of any suspect who takes advantage of his right to silence. Another bans television and radio statements by members of terrorist organizations, a sanction that the government extends to Sinn Fein, the legal political arm of the Irish Republican Army.

Britain continues to detain suspects without charge for up to seven days under its Prevention of Terrorism Act, despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights late last year that such action violates conventions to which this country is a signatory.

“To beat off your enemy in a war, you have to suspend some of your civil liberties for a time,” Thatcher has said. “Yes, some of those measures do restrict freedom. But those who choose to live by the bomb and the gun, and those who support them, can’t in all circumstances be accorded exactly the same rights as everyone else. We do sometimes have to sacrifice a little of the freedom we cherish in order to defend ourselves from those whose aim is to destroy that freedom altogether.”

May Be Topic at Talks

Whether Gorbachev will bring up any of these issues when this week’s talks turn to human rights is unclear.

During a stopover in Shannon, Ireland, on Sunday, on his way to Cuba, the Soviet leader seemed to take a very cautious stance on the problems of Northern Ireland.

“We leave that problem to the government of Great Britain to discuss,” he said.

However, Ireland’s prime minister, Charles Haughey, said after meeting with Gorbachev that he expected the Soviet leader to raise with Thatcher the cases of four people sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for the bombings of two English pubs in which seven patrons were killed.

The so-called Guilford Four were convicted largely on the basis of written confessions that they later retracted, claiming they had been tortured by their interrogators. Among those who have called for a retrial are the leaders of Britain’s Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. Earlier this year, Home Secretary Hurd finally referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.

For her part, Thatcher is expected to congratulate Gorbachev for what an aide described this week as the “marked improvement in Soviet performance” on human rights issues, while continuing to press him on specific problem cases of people refused permission to emigrate or imprisoned for religious and political beliefs.

In a full-page advertisement published in Wednesday’s editions of the London Times, 212 British members of Parliament--about one-third of the House of Commons--charged that a number of “basic human rights . . . continue to be abused in the Soviet Union.” No ministers in Thatcher’s government were among the signatories.