Jewish and Human Rights Groups to Protest American Bar Association’s Ties to Association of Soviet L

Human rights and Jewish groups plan to converge on the American Bar Association’s mid-year meeting this weekend in New Orleans to protest the ABA’s ties to the Association of Soviet Lawyers (ASL) which protesters called an anti-Semitic arm of the KGB.

The Task Force on ABA-Soviet Relations, Inc., a Phoenix-based group formed specifically to oppose the ties, has fought to dissolve a 1985 Declaration of Cooperation between the ASL and the ABA. The Task Force, some of whose members are attorneys, branded the ASL a puppet of the KGB whose attorneys were handpicked by the Soviet authorities.

Members of the Jewish community of Baton Rouge, LA, Ukrainian American groups and the Task Force members are among those expected to be represented at the demonstrations in New Orleans.

The Task Force will sponsor a forum on ABA-Soviet Relations simultaneous with the ABA convention and in the same hotel, the New Orleans Marriott.

The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Natan Sharansky and other Soviet Jewry activists have all opposed the ABA-ASL pact and have called on the ABA to abrogate the agreement.

STATEMENT BY JEWISH FEDERATION

The Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge issued a statement saying “The Association of Soviet Lawyers (ASL) is one of the more virulent arms of the Soviet regime and an instrument of repression of Soviet Jews and other activists. The American Bar Association’s agreement with the ASL gives that organization a legitimacy it does not deserve and does nothing to promote the welfare of Soviet Jews or true U.S. Soviet understanding.”

Richard Collins, ABA spokesperson, said the ABA debated the agreement extensively at an August meeting with critics in New York. In that meeting, Collins said, ABA members overwhelmingly supported continuing the agreement to keep a dialogue open. The members agreed there was a greater risk in not talking than in talking, Collins said.

Morris Abram, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who is an attorney, addressed the debate in New York saying he favored continuation of a revised form of the agreement on condition that human rights be high on the agenda of all contacts and that the agreement should only be maintained if there was some progress on human rights, Collins said.

With the exception of a few organizations, the “principle Jewish groups did not oppose the continuation of the declaration,” Collins said.

The Task Force claimed that in a meeting with the President of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Andrei Gromyko, in Moscow, former ABA president William Falsgraf and president-elect Eugene Thomas presented the issue of Jewish emigration as a “minority concern of Jewish groups” in the U.S. and of “Jewish members of the American Bar Association.” A Task Force letter to the press said this was revealed in an ABA internal memo on the meeting.

Falsgraf has denied this report numerous times. Although there is no formal transcript of the meeting, Collins said the situation was never characterized in those words.

TASK FORCE’S CLAIM

The Task Force also claimed that ABA has failed to fulfil a commitment to put human rights high on the agenda of all contacts with the ASL.

But this, too, was denied by the ABA. Collins said human rights enters into the exchanges on many topics, including the right to earlier counsel and the laws on anti-State activities or “what Americans call freedom of speech,” Collins said.

Collins also noted that the changes recently instituted in the Soviet Union seem to address those charged with anti-State crimes and the right to earlier counsel.

Also in the August debate, the Task Force letter said the ABA leadership acknowledged that the ASL is “similar to or maybe worse than the Goebbels Propaganda Ministry” of Hitler’s Third Reich. Collins said a former member of the ABA Board of Governors, Federal Judge Frank Kaufman, who was not considered a member of ABA leadership, did indeed make that comment. Collins added that Kaufmann favored continuation of the agreement.

A spokeswoman for the Task Force, Patience Huntwork, said the Soviets pressured the ABA into signing the agreement to use as propaganda.