U.S. Urged to Maintain Its Defense of Human Rights Worldwide

The head of the American Jewish Committee, a foreign affairs expert and a noted legal scholar urged the United States government to maintain its defense of human rights throughout the world, in remarks prepared for delivery here tomorrow.

Maynard Wishner, president of the AJCommittee, and Sol Linowitz, who was the special representative of President Carter for Middle East negotiations, will make their pleas for strong U.S. support of the fights of individuals, before an audience of 1,000 at a dinner marking the AJC’s 75th anniversary. The dinner takes place at the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the five-day meeting continues through Sunday.

Wishner pledged the AJCommittee’s aid in “our country’s effort to protect the forces of freedom and justice wherever they struggle to assert themselves.” He called on the United States to frame and to further a coherent and effective human rights policy.

Pointing out that only a minority of the peoples of the world lived in freedom and that the few remaining democratic governments elsewhere were in peril, Wishner urged the United State to exert its leadership “within all effective international bodies,” to stem anarchy, terrorism and tyranny.

Turning to the situation in Israel, Wishner expressed his conviction that the United States had a “transcendental national and strategic interest in the survival of democracy there.” But the search for a just and enduring peace in the Middle East, he said, could be seriously endangered by the escalation of the arms race, accompanied by the possibility of a significant change in the balance of power in the area. “We are convinced,” Wishner stated, “that placing American weaponry in unstable hands is not in the best interest of the United States.”

During his remarks, Linowitze came out strongly for continued United States dedication to human rights lest “we weaken a vital source of our strength throughout the world.”

JEWISH ROLE IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Louis Henkin, University Professor at Columbia University, co-director of the Columbia Center for the Study of Human Rights, and president of the U.S. Institute of Human Rights, asserted that “if there are any exclusively Jewish issues in today’s world, there are none in human rights. One cannot protect the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union or Latin America except by maintaining universal human rights standards and effective international human rights institutions.”

Expanding on his theme, Henkin said that the United States “cannot intercede effectively for the human rights of Jews except as part of a clear and firm policy of support for human rights for all, everywhere.”

“There may be differences,” he continued, “between so-called authoritarian and so-called totalitarian governments, but they don’t have much to do with human rights. It is not obvious that it is better to disappear in Argentina then to rot in a Russian gulag….”

The Jewish “commitment to human rights,” Henkin went on, “has deep spiritual-cultural affinities” and is “supported by Jewish experience and an abiding sense of … vulnerability … Jews know that … Jewish rights can be secure only … as part of a concern and a struggle for the rights of all human beings everywhere … The Jewish community and all Jewish organizations must continue to act on that knowledge today as they have in the past.”