Rights: Alien Idea in Much of World : Authoritarian voices heard at U.N. conference

Most great international conferences develop out of a consensus that something affecting all or much of the world is amiss and in need of change. But the 183-nation U.N. human rights conference now in session in Vienna finds a significant number of the states there laboring determinedly not to advance but to prevent change.

Led by China, these mainly Third World and usually authoritarian countries are eager to block proposals for more activist efforts to protect groups and individuals everywhere--with special reference to women--from human rights abuses. Their basic attack is on the 45-year-old U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

The complaint of these countries is that human rights principles are mainly Western in origin, which is true, and that their interest and relevance to non-Western peoples is limited, which is emphatically not true.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher addressed this rationale directly and put the point well: “That each of us comes from different cultures absolves none of us from our obligation to comply with the Universal Declaration. Torture, rape, racism, anti-Semitism, arbitrary detention, ethnic cleansing and politically motivated disappearances--none of these is tolerated by any faith, creed or culture that respects humanity. Nor can they be justified by the demands of economic development or political expedience.” We cannot, he concluded, “let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression.”

Christopher’s eloquent words and the great ideas that underlie them won’t by themselves convert oppressors to humanitarians or cause authoritarian regimes to emerge as champions of political pluralism. But the values they embody are worth constant reaffirmation nonetheless. Individuals have inherent rights that are not limited by state boundaries.

Much of the world happens to be governed by political systems that are based on the notion that individual rights must be subordinated to the interests of the state. This, say the defenders of these systems, grows out of traditions that in some cases are thousands of years old. That ancient customs can serve as the excuse to perpetuate contemporary tyrannies is obvious. To suggest that this is how the mass of people prefer to have it is absurd.

We hope the United States and other liberal democracies stand firm in Vienna in behalf of extending and protecting human rights. For most of the world, the principles of the declaration voted by most U.N. members in 1948 remain largely unknown. But known or not, their validity remains universal.