Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume II, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs

205. Paper Prepared in the Department of State¹

Washington, undated

PLANNING PAPER

Human Rights: 1981–85

I. Background

The international climate is going to worsen for human rights. Third World governments will feel increasingly threatened by a combination of hard times economically, internal pressures for change, and in some cases actual or feared Soviet or Soviet/Cuban efforts to exploit internal problems.

The US public is also becoming more alarmed both about security threats and about economic problems and therefore exports. This could make it harder to keep American public and Congressional support for active human rights policies.

The assumption that human rights and security interests were conflicting goals which had to be balanced against each other has always been analytically wrong. Respect for human rights is necessary to long-term stability, and therefore to US security interests. As President Carter said in his State of the Union message, “In repressive regimes, popular frustrations often have no outlet except violence.”² Moreover, it is a concern for human rights that ties together the varied policies of this Administration: the human rights policy as such; our support for peaceful resolution of grievances in southern Africa, the Middle East, and Central America; our approach to North-South economic issues; and our strong resistance to Soviet violation of Afghan human rights.

Failure to make clear this vital link between human rights and US security interests could gravely undermine our whole human rights approach.

II. Policy Issues and Priorities

The priority goal of US human rights policies over the next five years should be to convince foreign governments, and US public and Congressional opinion, that respect for human rights is a requirement of long-term stability and therefore serves US security interests.

Three areas of endeavor will be central to this effort: development of strategies for key individual countries; strengthening regional organizations in their understanding of, and responsibility for, related regional stability/human rights problems; and demonstrating to nervous governments that the aim of our human rights policies is not their “destabilization.”

We also should use the next five years to ensure the domestic foundations of our human rights policy. Priority attention should be given to an aggressive and sustained effort to explain the connection between human rights and security interests. We also should ratify UN and OAS Charters and Covenants, and complete a body of legislation that will help ensure attention to human rights concerns by future American Administrations while allowing enough flexibility for pragmatic implementation of a policy that can maintain domestic support.

A. Country Strategies

Five-Year Goal: Especially for human rights problem countries where there are important US security interests, we need country strategies that focus not on human rights as such, or on immediate security needs, but rather on the longer-run requirements of stability and the prospects, and limits, for American influence in that particular situation.

There is no abstract formula—or choice among strategies—for convincing governments which feel threatened by pressures for change to share our view of the requirements of stability. Strategies will have to be shaped with regard to individual countries, bearing in mind the sources of internal instability, the state of its political development, and the nature (if any) of genuine external security threat, as well as the particular human rights problem.

These strategies should include not only questions of USG pressures and/or assistance, but also of opportunities to work with (or complementary to) other democracies or democratic forces. Southern European Socialists, for instance, are eager to establish links with the non-Communist left in Latin America (especially in the troubled Central America and Caribbean region). And even some European government leaders who are relatively unmoved by claims of human rights as such are increasingly sensitive to the dangers to stability—and so to Western economic and security interests—posed by repressive regimes.

Country strategies should also focus on how we can encourage private American groups to develop ties with foreign counterparts (press, lawyers, teachers, business) which might be forces for pluralism and peaceful political progress. Good examples include recent State Department facilitation of contacts between groups of African lawyers and American bar groups, and an AID grant to the President of the Institute for Law and Social Policy (a former US Ambassador) for exchanges with African legal groups.

Such strategies obviously would be most useful before a country reaches the explosive stage.

B. Strengthening Regional Organizations

Five-Year Goal: Regional organizations which understand the link between human rights and stability, and are willing and able to take primary responsibility for their areas.

The Andean Pact states and OAS got involved in Nicaragua, and ASEAN started cooperating on refugee problems, at least as much from a concern about regional stability as about human rights as such. African awareness of the potential danger posed to regional stability by that continent’s Emperor Bokassas or Sargent Does is one reason for tentative gropings by the OAU for a human rights policy.

We should try to build on this appreciation of the link between human rights and stability, and look for ways to strengthen efforts by all regional bodies. This would have the added benefit of further multilateralizing human rights efforts, and creating a greater sense of responsibility for them on the part of Third World nations and organizations.

Efforts on our part will need to be skillful, and carefully calculated to specific cases, to avoid smothering regional efforts with a Big Brother embrace. The OAS, for example, already has an active human rights policy. While continuing to make clear we support it, we should increasingly let Latin American states take the lead. In regional cooperation among ASEAN members there is little resonance for “human rights” under that label. What they most need from us, and other industrialized democracies, is money to help with crushing refugee burdens. The cause of human rights is likely to fare better in the OAU if we continue to let UN officials and African moderates take the lead. We can best help by facilitating the kind of contacts in individual African states sketched above, and by economic assistance to get at one of the prime causes of instability and repression.

C. Reassuring Nervous Governments

Five-Year Goal: To demonstrate—with deeds, not just words—to all governments that our aim is not their “destabilization.”

Our constant message must be that the only way to avoid further Nicaraguas or Irans is by beginning the process of liberalization when reform and compromise are still a viable alternative to revolution and radicalization . . . that the only thing more dangerous than change is refusal to change.

This argument will need to be reinforced by demonstrated sensitivity to differing situations and political perceptions.

Exchanges with Third World leaders on different forms of political expression can help convey the message that we are not trying to impose our form of government on others. ICJ-sponsored work with African officials on the nature of political competition in one-party states was useful in this regard. Direct USG exchanges would be better still in demonstrating our interest in understanding their perspectives.

We also need to re-examine the question of which USG “sanctions”—opposition to MDB loans; curtailment of bilateral aid; denial of military sales or assistance—to continue when violations of the person have virtually ended but a regime remains fundamentally repressive. Easing sanctions just because a government is not at the moment arresting, torturing, or killing its opposition could undermine our efforts for those institutional changes which are the best longer-range guarantee of continued respect for rights of the person, as well as for political liberalization. But refusal to respond concretely to non-institutional improvements could reinforce suspicions—in the country concerned and among its neighbors—that we will be satisfied with nothing less than the downfall of individuals or regimes. That could lessen chances both for immediate human rights improvements, and for persuading governments of the sincerity—much less the wisdom—of our claim that internal stability and human rights improvements are inextricably linked. We favor the second course.

D. Ensuring the Domestic Foundations of Our Human Rights Policy

Five-Year Goal: Solid public and Congressional support for the human rights policy, and sophisticated understanding of its relationship to US security interests.

Growing security and economic worries in this country could put the human rights policy in at least as much trouble at home as abroad. Two areas of endeavor can help with this problem.

(1) Making our Case

The litany of accomplishments—tens of thousands of political prisoners released in over a dozen countries; fewer “disappearances” and reports of torture; movement from military to civilian rule in many countries; and the awareness of those tempted to overturn election results that it would cost them in their relations with us and in their broader international standing—are familiar to us but will need frequent stress to an increasingly skeptical public.

We should always, however, couple recitals of what we are doing for others with its relevance to concrete US interests:

—Support for peaceful change is support for stability.

—And it puts us in better position to work with change when it does happen. Even in countries where our human rights advocacy has strained relations with repressive governments, civilian professional and business classes—and in some cases younger military—who should always have looked to the US as a model and source of hope no longer see a disconnect between the freedoms we insist on for ourselves, and our support of dictatorships over them.

(2) The Legal Basis of US Human Rights Policy

We should soon end the anomaly of the US proclaiming itself as a leader of international human rights efforts, but not yet having ratified the basic human rights Covenants and Conventions of the United Nations and Organization of American States.

Five are before the Senate: The Genocide Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and the American Convention on Human Rights. The Genocide Convention merits top priority. Adopted by the UN in 1948, it has been ratified by more than 80 states and has deep symbolic significance.

The next term should also leave a legacy of a consistent body of domestic legislation that will help ensure continued attention to human rights by future Administrations, while giving them (and ourselves) the flexibility necessary for pragmatic implementation of a policy that can maintain domestic support.

—All programs designed primarily to promote US exports should have the same human rights criteria (OPIC is now more restrained than ExIm or CCC). US policy options are to treat these as we do other forms of USG assistance, or to interfere with them only when there is a strong chance that doing so would actually lead to human rights improvements (not just for “distancing”). Given what injecting human rights into these programs already has done to arouse opposition to the policy by US business interests—and the marginal incremental effect on most human rights problems of adding use of these programs to our other pressures—we favor the latter.

—Country Specific Legislation. This often has more to do with the ideological bent of certain legislators than with concern for world-wide human rights. And it can limit our flexibility to offer gradual inducement to governments which are prepared to undertake gradual reforms. But Administration initiatives to remove the country specific legislation which now exists would be seen as a weakening of our human rights commitment. Our alternatives are to make a push early in the new Administration to remove all country specific legislation, or to leave present legislation in place (absent substantial human rights improvements in the specific countries) but resist new legislation of this type. The latter probably is more feasible on the Hill.

—Legal mandate for the Interagency Group on Human Rights and Foreign Assistance. A bill to this effect may well be introduced in the next Congress, and might require that security assistance also be considered by the Group. Our options would be to oppose such legislation, on the ground that the Executive Branch should be able to establish—and change—its internal, decision-making procedures; or support it because it is effective and because anything else might signal a weakening of our human rights commitment. This is not an important substantive issue; future Administrations could keep the same machinery but make very different human rights decisions. We should stay neutral.

—Present legislation governing bilateral and multilateral aid and security assistance. This has been useful in reinforcing policies this Administration wanted to pursue. It has given us enough flexibility to tailor human rights efforts to be effective in differing situations, and to protect US security and economic interests. It could be even more important in forcing future Administrations at least to consider human rights factors in assistance decisions and to justify their decisions to interested parties on the Hill. We should resist any efforts either to weaken it or to make it more stringent.

1. Source: National Archives, RG 59, Policy and Planning Staff—Office of the Director, Records of Anthony Lake, 1977–1981, Lot 82D298, Box 20. Confidential. The paper is part of a Department of State Briefing Book entitled “Five Year Project” and constitutes part XV of XVII of the larger report on U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives and Priorities, 1980–85. According to an August 4 memorandum from Donovan to Brzezinski and Lake, Carter had requested that Donovan organize and edit the Objectives and Priorities report, with input from the NSC, ICA, CIA, and Departments of State and Defense. (Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Defense/Security—Molander, Box 77, Human Rights (Five Year Goals) [7–8/80]) Earlier versions of the human rights planning paper are ibid., and in the Department of State, Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, 1980 Human Rights Subject Files, Lot 82D180, SHUM Policies 1980.
2. The quotation is from a paragraph of the President’s January 23 State of the Union address, which reads as follows: “In repressive regimes, popular frustrations often have no outlet except through violence. But when peoples and their governments can approach their problems together through open, democratic methods, the basis for stability and peace is far more solid and far more enduring. That is why our support for human rights in other countries is in our own national interest as well as part of our own national character.” (Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, January 28, 1980, pp. 198–199)