COLUMN RIGHT/ JOSHUA MURAVCHIK : Why Accept the Hubris of Tyrants? : The newly democratic world must hold the line on rights.

Before its opening gavel sounded, the U.N.’s World Conference on Human Rights, which convened Monday in Vienna, had occasioned the most audacious coalition of dictators of the left and right since the Stalin-Hitler pact. The alliance’s first goal is to block any strengthening of international mechanisms for upholding human rights, especially those that would make human rights an issue in the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or other such lending institutions.

Its more ambitious goal is to dilute existing international legal standards of human rights through the adoption of language that would introduce loopholes and ambiguities in the conference’s “final declaration.”

The alliance was organized in April at an Asian regional meeting in Bangkok to prepare for the world conference. The prime movers were tyrants of every stripe: the communist regime of China, the anti-communist dictatorship of Indonesia, the mullahs’ theocracy of Iran, the secular Baathist regime of Syria, the “socialist” military rulers of Burma and that avatar of Asian capitalism, the government of Singapore. On the question of human rights, they found that they had a lot in common, and completely dominated the 49-nation meeting.

With a drafting committee chaired by Iran, the conference adopted by consensus the “Bangkok Declaration,” which embodies language that they now hope will be accepted in Vienna. Although it makes various rhetorical bows to human-rights principles, the declaration emphasizes three principles that are subversive to human rights: state sovereignty, cultural relativism and the “right to development.”

State sovereignty means that no matter what a government does to its own people, no outsider has the standing to object. “Only when state sovereignty is fully respected can the implementation of human rights really be ensured,” explained the representative from China in splendid Orwellian fashion.

Cultural relativism means that human-rights standards must be refracted through the prism of differing histories and situations. For example, “in order to have democracy, firstly law and order must be established,” explained the representative of the bloody Burmese military regime. These are old refrains of tyrants.

The “right to development” is a new one, but not as new as its sounds. The dictators don’t want to lose any aid on account of their abuses, so the Bangkok Declaration decries “any attempt to use human rights as a conditionality for extending development assistance.” There is also a broader purpose to emphasizing the “right to development.” Dictators often argue that their repression is necessitated by the exigencies of development. Thus, if they violate some rights, it is only in order to fulfill others. Much the same use has been made of the rubric “economic and social rights.” As historian Arthur Schlesinger once quipped, U.N. treaties “included both ‘civil and political rights’ and ‘economic, social and cultural rights,’ the second category designed to please states that denied their subjects the first.”

U.S. representatives believe that they have the votes to block the adoption in Vienna of the offending language in the Bangkok Declaration. But they don’t want the controversy to come to a vote because that could be seen as weakening the aura of unanimity that today surrounds the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the other hand, they don’t want to compromise on a document that in any degree dilutes existing standards. They say that they would rather the conference end without any document at all--which by U.N. standards is tantamount to failure.

They may be pursuing the wrong strategy. The end of the Cold War has brought down many barriers, including, it seems, the barrier that used to divide communist from anti-communist tyrants. On the other side of the coin, advocates of human rights and democracy are united across the political spectrum as never before. Why shouldn’t the democracies accept the challenge thrown down by the dictators? Who needs false unanimity? Why not declare that the new dividing line in global politics is between those who honor and practice human rights and democracy and those who do not? Why not have a vote?

Win or lose, democracy and human rights are ascendant, while on the other side, with the collapse of communism, no coherent justification for dictatorship endures. The brazen gambit initiated in Bangkok by some of the world’s worst tyrants was an act of hubris that can be turned against them. They all feel the ground rumbling beneath their feet. Let them stew in each other’s company. Remember what happened to Hitler and Stalin.