Human Wrongs

Grading the behavior of others

Almost eight years after imposing its fierce brand of Communist rule over all of Viet Nam, Hanoi has a new claim to notoriety. "It seemed to me the worst country to live in," commented Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, as tie unveiled the State Department's annual human rights survey last week.

The report paints a grim portrait of Viet Nam. More than 60,000 political prisoners, it says, remained detained in "reeducation camps" without ever having been brought to trial. Citizens cannot travel, or even change residences, without permission. The press practices rigid self-censorship. There is no freedom of assembly. The forecast for future political rights in Viet Nam? Concludes the report: "Bleak."

The 1,323-page survey evaluates the human rights practices of 162 govern ments, almost all of them members of the U.N. It is mandated by a 1976 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that Congress passed, over the opposition of the Ford Administration, requiring the Executive Branch to produce an annual evaluation to help Congress make decisions on foreign aid. The report is more tolerant toward the behavior of U.S. friends than that of antagonists. "With friendly countries, we prefer to use diplomacy, not public pronouncements," it says. Not surprisingly, the survey's main villains are the Soviet Union ("The status of human rights . . . continues to fall far short of accepted inter national standards"), Cuba ("Freedoms of speech and press do not exist") and Nicaragua ("The human rights situation deteriorated markedly in 1982"). But other regimes that have been accused of serious human rights violations by watchdog organizations like Amnesty International get off lightly: El Salvador ("signs of improvement throughout the year"), Argentina ("significant expansion of civil and political liberties") and Turkey ("Politically motivated killings . . . have now virtually stopped").

Scholars and human rights organizations greeted the report with varying degrees of skepticism or approval. In a joint statement with Helsinki Watch and Americas Watch, two human rights groups, Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, accused the Administration of "disturbing biases" toward countries in which it "has a strong political stake." Hue-Tam Tai, a Vietnamese professor of history at Harvard University, questioned the conclusion that Hanoi was last year's most egregious human rights violator. "There are other countries, including China, Iran and some U.S. allies in South America, that I would consider very likely worse," she said.

According to Huynh Sanh Thong, director of the Southeast Asian Refugee Project at Yale University, the State Department's estimate of 60,000 political prisoners in Viet Nam may be too conservative. He argues that human rights surveys like the State Department's serve a useful purpose. "Hanoi drags its feet [about releasing political prisoners]," says Thong, who emigrated to the U.S. from Viet Nam in 1964. "American public opinion is not unanimous against the regime. Hanoi needs the pressure." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.