U.S.S.R. invites human-rights monitoring group to visit

Press, 24 September 1987, Page 6

U.S.S.R. invites human-rights monitoring group to visit

NZPA-Reuter Vienna The Soviet Union countered Western criticism of its human rights record on Tuesday by inviting to Moscow an international group set up to monitor alleged violations. At the resumption of the extended 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the chief Soviet delegate, Yuri Kashlev, told a news conference that the International Helsinki Federation of Human Rights was welcome to send a delegation. The announcement came shortly after a British minister had criticised the Soviet Union’s human rights record, calling the present level of emigration "paltry.” David Mellor, a junior Foreign Office Minister, said there had been some positive movement in Eastern Europe, “but

frankly I have the impression of a swimmer who has only put his foot in the water.” The decision to allow the Human Rights Federation to visit Moscow surprised the Stockholmbased group, which had made clear when requesting a visit last June that it would insist on meeting dissidents. The group was founded in 1982 by national human rights monitoring committees created under the original 1975 Helsinki European security conference. “We were surprised, but we think it is a very positive step,” the federation’s executive director, Gerald Nagler, told reporters. Mr Nagler said a 12member delegation representing several countries, including former Cabinet Ministers and a Nobel Prize winner, would meet

officials from the Justice, Interior and Foreign Ministries, the State prosecutor’s office and the Academy of Sciences during a five-day stay. The Russian side had suggested that they go next week, but this was too short notice and a date was still to be decided, Mr Nagler said. In his speech Mr Mellor said figures announced by Kashlev yesterday that 20,000 people had emigrated from the Soviet Union so far this year were higher than previous years, but “viewed against the demand, and the record of the 19705, they are still paltry”. Mr Kashlev reiterated the Eastern Bloc’s proposal for an international conference in Moscow to discuss human rights that could produce practical results. Mr Mellor, however, said British participation

in such a meeting, which some delegations fear could serve to attack Western unemployment and other social issues, depended on progress in coming weeks in Vienna. He warned the Soviet Union and its East European allies that they could not secure agreement to hold substantial. negotiations on military issues without similar agreement to discuss human rights and contacts. “Such an unbalanced one-sided outcome is simply not acceptable to public opinion in the West,” he told delegates. The West has called for a new mechanism, opposed by the Eastern Bloc, to call meetings at short notice to discuss alleged human rights violations between meetings of the conference. Three such meetings have taken place since the original 1975 Helsinki conference.