A battle shaped up in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights meeting here yesterday over the issue of “selective morality” in focussing on alleged violations of human rights in certain countries while ignoring them in others. The Commission opened a five-week session with an agenda topped by “human rights violations” in Arab territories occupied by Israel and in Chile.
The U.S. representative, Leonard Garment, declared, “If we care only about some human rights violations in some countries, then we do not care about human rights anywhere.” He said “We must reject the temptation to submit to one political bias or another in expressing concern for human rights….The way this commission addresses the question of torture and the issue of political prisoners is a central test of selective morality.”
Garment, an advisor to Daniel P. Moynihan who submitted his resignation Monday as U.S. Ambassador to the UN, was addressing his remarks primarily to the Arab and Third World voting blocs. They had been the target of Moynihan’s criticism of voting blocs in the world organization in connection with last November’s anti-Zionist resolution and other issues.
Garment urged top priority for a declaration against religious intolerance which, he said, would prove the Commission’s concern with all aspects of human rights rather than those. “which serve the interests or satisfy the aims of disparate voting coalitions.” Garment is expected to try to bloc any condemnation of alleged Israeli violations of the rights of persons in the occupied territories.
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