The Canadian Parliament, by unanimous vote, has urged the Soviet Union to free imprisoned activist Anatoly Shcharansky who has been on a hunger strike since Yom Kippur in Moscow’s Chistipol prison.
The Secretary of State for External Affairs, Charles Lapointe, called Shcharansky’s continued incarceration a “fundamental denial” of his human rights. He told Parliament that the Canadian government has made direct representations to the Soviet authorities to release Shcharansky who was convicted in 1978 for alleged espionage and is serving a 13 year sentence.
Before the vote last Friday, Flora MacDonald of the opposition Progressive Conservative Party, a former External Affairs Secretary, said the release of Shcharansky was a condition for the resumption of the Canadian-Soviet dialogue abandoned after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. She said this was made clear to Soviet officials by a Canadian delegation presently visiting Moscow.
Due to an error in overseas transmission, a story from Paris in the November 17 Bulletin stated that the Arab plan for the Mideast drawn up at the recent Fez conference calls for mutual recognition by Israel and the PLO and for the PLO’s participation in future peace talks. Actually, this was an interpretation of the Fez plan as it was presented by the seven-member Arab delegation headed by King Hussein of Jordan during a meeting with President Francois Mitterrand. The official text of the Fez plan does not contain the two points.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
