David A. Schwarz
U.S. Delegation, U.N. Commission on Human Rights
Item 11: Civil and Political Rights
April 4, 2001

Mr. Chairman:
Two hundred and twenty five years ago our nation declared its independence by asserting the self-evident truth "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

These notions - that the individual has rights which are prior to government; that protection of these rights is the very purpose of government; that the just powers of government depend on the consent of the governed - are the essence of democracy. We make no claim to their ownership, for it has been said that "America did not invent human rights; but, in a very real sense, human rights did invent America."

" We believe the protection and promotion of human liberty to be a central undertaking of the United Nations. We also believe that the promotion of democracy is the best way to protect human rights. "

We believe the protection and promotion of human liberty to be a central undertaking of the United Nations. We also believe that the promotion of democracy is the best way to protect human rights. As President Bush has said: "We propose our principles; we must not impose our cultures. Yet the basic principles of human freedom and dignity are universal. People should be able to say what they think. Worship as they please. Elect those who govern them." For these reasons, the protection of civil and political rights should be the central work of this Commission. These rights should be uniformly applied without prejudice to ethnicity, political affiliation, or race.

Freedom of expression is the enabling civil and political right. No other universally recognized right - including self-determination, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion - can flourish without it. Most days at the Palais the distinguished delegates do a pretty good job of exercising that right, even though that right is not always protected in their own countries.

Tolerance for the opinions of others is the price we pay for a free society. That rule applies in this chamber; it should apply in all of our countries. It means that we must make room for dissent, whether voiced on the Internet, in the press, or in the public square - on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the Place des Nations in Geneva, Red Square in Moscow, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

It means that the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression should not be prevented from visiting those countries from which he has requested invitations, but from which he has not yet received an answer.

It means that beliefs and opinions, no matter how offensive, need to be heard, debated, and tested in what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the marketplace of ideas. That is the only way reasonable people can hope to tell the difference between fact and fiction. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It also is a central premise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Now, the Framers of our Constitution understood that the expression of these fundamental rights - to speak, to assemble, to worship, or to leave one's country of origin -- is an inherent part of our humanity. The right to life, liberty and security of person does not exist because it is written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rather, these rights are stated in the Declaration and codified in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights because they really do exist - and always did. We know in our hearts that to massacre, to torture and to enslave are fundamentally wrong. That knowledge is what distinguishes us from all other of God's creatures. "Man," as the great English essayist, William Hazlitt, observed, "is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."

Men and women of good conscience who heard Archbishop Tutu's statement on respect and tolerance could not help but be shocked by his description of the testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He talked of the massacre of innocent men, whose murderers dismembered and burned the bodies of their victims: He quoted: "It takes about nine hours to burn a human being, and so we made a barbecue of the fire whilst we watched the bodies burn." We are shocked because an unspeakable crime had been committed. We are shocked because we all know - even the people who committed these obscene acts knew - that what was done was terribly wrong.

A child may not know the meaning of the word genocide; but a child knows that to take life indiscriminately is wrong. Yet, words do matter. The words must fit the crime; otherwise, words like "genocide" and "racism" and "Apartheid" - indeed, the entire vocabulary of human rights - becomes drained of meaning.

Many of the nations in this assembly - mine included - owe their independence to the notion of human rights. That notion exercised its influence over the old colonial powers; it created new nations; it offered hope to millions that lived, and still live, under regimes that do not respect these rights.

When the language of human rights loses its specific meaning; when we call every goal a right, and every wrong a "crime against humanity;" when the language of Jefferson and Rousseau and Gandhi is worn out, or destroyed, or perverted, we stand a good chance of giving away something that cannot be regained.

That, unfortunately, has happened and is still happening. The terrible irony of the Nazi regime sprang not just from its lawlessness, but from its creation of a perverse and comprehensive set of laws intended to "justify" the persecution of millions of Jews. Pol Pot's murderous utopia slaughtered two million Cambodians as the imperative of the "right to national unity."

Today, some nations - including some members of this Commission - are using the language of human rights to deny individual freedom, rather than to protect it. They assert the supremacy of their "rights" to justify the denial of freedom or to trump universal human rights. They pervert the language of the rule of law by insisting that they do not have any religious or political dissenters rotting in their prisons, their labor camps, or their psychiatric hospitals - just people who violate their laws or who constitute "political harm to society."

Examples abound of this perversion of law. A short while ago a man named Huang Qi went on trial before a closed session of the Intermediate Court in Chengdu, China for something most of us do every day - sending and receiving e-mail. His crime? Allegedly posting texts critical of the Chinese government. In Cuba, independent journalist and labor activist Jose Orlando Gonzalez Bridon was arrested February 15. Prosecutors are charging him with disseminating "enemy propaganda" because he publicly criticized the police. In Vietnam, Father Tadeus Nguyen Van Ly is under house arrest after he submitted written testimony on behalf of religious freedom before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and called for freedom of religion in Vietnam. In the Ukraine, the death of the journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, who published texts critical of the government, is particularly disturbing. In Belarus, critics of the Lukashenko regime like Dimitry Zavadsky, Yury Zakharenko, Victor Gonchar, and Anatoly Krasovsky have "disappeared." These men were punished for the exercise of their human rights. Nothing more.

We also reassert the freedom of conscience, belief and religion. This freedom is at the heart of individual morality - that which helps us understand right from wrong. As Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick has written: "Freedom of conscience is the most deeply held freedom because it involves the most basic aspects of the human being, of his desire to understand his world and place himself in it."

Many of the first settlers to arrive on our shores were looking for freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of religion. Fundamental to the dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience is also fundamental to the development of democratic institutions. The founding fathers of the United States recognized this and guaranteed the protection of freedom of religion and belief in the first clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Mr. Chairman, democracies tend to flourish where religious freedom is protected. The converse is also true: where there is no religious freedom, democracies often perish, or never take root.

Today, this freedom is under continuous and unrelenting assault. Not surprisingly, the governments that engage in egregious and direct religious persecution are seldom democratic and systematically deny other human rights. These governments all share an approach that insists that a single, approved ideology be accepted by all their citizens.

In China, people who practice Buddhism, Christianity or Islam outside government sanctioned organizations, or who engage in certain kinds of spiritual pursuits, are arrested -- not for any harm they have done; but for their religious and spiritual practices. Some are beaten, or tortured, or imprisoned in so-called "reeducation through labor" camps. In China, some Falun Gong practitioners have been placed in police-run psychiatric hospitals. Sometimes, they die in police custody. And we wonder how any nation can justify the closure or demolition of over a thousand places of worship, as did China, just before Christmas.

The government of Sudan is trying to forcibly impose its own strict interpretation of Islamic law on its diverse population thus contributing to a civil war that has caused two million deaths and twice that many internally displaced persons. Khartoum also encourages the practice of slavery and denies humanitarian access to needy populations in areas outside its control.

The Government of Vietnam restricts freedom of religion, with a focus on the activities of religious organizations not approved by the State. Recently, the Government has intensified its attempts to harass and repress groups of dissident Buddhists, including the leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam and the unofficial Hoa Hao association, as well as leaders of independent Protestant churches in the Central Highlands. Forms of harassment have included detention, imprisonment, and house arrest. The Government of Vietnam has also repressed attempts by some of these leaders and some priests of the Catholic Church to form an autonomous interfaith association.

The Government of Laos has not protected the religious freedom of the country's Protestant minority. Almost 100 Protestant believers were detained during 2000, and some were sentenced to long prison terms on vague and dubious charges. In Vientiane province, local authorities during the year implemented campaigns of religious harassment that included coerced personal renunciations of faith on a wide scale and closure of established churches.

The Iraqi regime has murdered clerics, desecrated mosques and holy sites, imprisoned, persecuted, and killed tens of thousands of Shi'ites and members of other religious groups. Iran deprives Baha'is of their basic human rights because of their religious beliefs. Both Baha'is and members of the country's small Jewish community are imprisoned on trumped-up charges. In North Korea, genuine religious freedom does not exist. The regime appears to have cracked down on unauthorized religious groups in recent years. Reports of executions, torture, and imprisonment continue to emerge.

Why is it that the freedom to worship is so reviled and feared by tyrannical governments? It is not just because its expression depends, as it must, on the protection of other, basic human rights - such as the right to speak, to assemble, and to dissent. It is feared because it threatens the monopoly of loyalty, the monopoly of thought, that a tyranny must assert to maintain order and control over the individual. Tyranny rests on the premise that every word, thought, and deed of every individual must be subordinated to the state. Any belief system that stands for the primacy of the individual over the state is seen as a threat to a totalitarian system of government. That is why tyrannies fear religious expression. It is contrary to the notion that the individual owes his existence to the state, rather than the notion that the state owes its existence to the individual.

While freedom of religious belief is necessary to the fulfillment of civil rights, it is not enough. Freedom of religious belief places a double responsibility on the state: To guarantee the right of the individual to worship as he wishes, and to ensure that neither individuals nor the state abridges that right. This means that governments cannot acquiesce in that persecution by failing to protect vulnerable religious minorities or by failing to punish their tormentors. This means that atrocities, whose perpetrators falsely claim to be acting in the name of religion, must be stopped. It means that private acts of religious persecution must be stopped. It also means that governments must assume the responsibility of protecting churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and houses of worship of every kind from acts of destruction.

To this, we add one final thought. Part of the genius of the Internet and satellite television is their ability to broadcast instantaneously graphic evidence of human rights violations. The question is no longer whether we are hearing about the commission of these crimes. The question is whether we are listening. The sad fact of the 20th Century is not that the world was unaware of the Holocaust, or of Pol Pot's genocide, or of the massacres in Rwanda. The sad fact is that the world did too little, or waited too long, to stop these tragedies.

And so, Mr. Chairman, the question before the Commission is not whether there are violations of the rights under discussion today. The question before the Commission is whether we have the will to believe that such wrongs are occurring - and to stop them.
Thank you.