About Human Rights, Security and Global Goals

A Book is Written to be Read

     

In the aftermath of World War II as the epic scale of brutality was recognized and terms like genocide and holocaust came into common use, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948.

In a historical first, the declaration elevated human rights to a central place in civilization the world over. In the decades that followed, scores of other declarations, treaties and agreements expanded the meaning of respect for human rights from rhetoric to practice. Most recently, South Africa has taken an allegation of genocide against Israel in Gaza to the U.N’s highest judicial forum, the International Court of Justice..

One of the major agreements - a template for human rights and security — was known as the Helsinki Accords, a comprehensive agreement that was reached after three years of negotiations at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. On August 1, 1975, it was signed by the leaders of thirty-five nations in Europe, The United States and Canada.

The provisions it contained set the national borders in Europe and outlined provisions broadly designed to establish the rights of people to maintain societies open to freedom of expression and movement.

CSCE – The Helsinki Accords – unexpectedly had a significant and lasting effect in Europe, almost entirely securing boundaries that lasted for nearly fifty years, until Russia’s Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022, violating every principle agreed at Helsinki. Even the Balkan wars of the 1990s were essentially fought within the borders of the former Yugoslavia.

And most astonishingly between 1989 and 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics imploded ending Russia’s imperial dominance of Eastern Europe from the Baltics through the Caucasus and Central Asia to the Chinese border an upheaval without substantial violence – until Putin moved to reclaim Russian hegemony in Ukraine.

The Helsinki Accords was also the instigation for a small group of dissidents, first in Moscow led by the great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov and later elsewhere in the region to establish Helsinki monitoring groups holding regimes to account for their pledges in the accords.

Helsinki Watch, a comparable monitoring group was formed in New York in 1978 and in time it evolved to encompass global coverage becoming the most formidable NGO in the history of support for human rights, with research so thorough that it empowered influential advocacy for its goals.

Organizations of mission and principle need three things to endure: Vision, leadership and money. Over time, HRW had all three. The Helsinki Accords enabled the essential vision that inspired a global human rights movement.

Last spring, Platform Books published Would You Believe…The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? which I wrote with Holly Cartner. It is a narrative of how the Conference of Security and Cooperation came to be, including its impressive security record – leading to the peaceful reunification of Germany – and the saga of how that small Moscow group, which the Kremlin did whatever it could to repress, became what Human Rights Watch is today.

Ironically for an organization founded to make critical judgments, HRW’s program director wrote me an email complaining that my not altogether flattering description of it was “contentious.”

The hardcover of that book is available for sale at any bookstore (ISBN-978-1735996899) if you ask for it to be ordered. It is now also available to be downloaded at no charge at Platformbooksllc.net either as an ePub digital book with an app or as a PDF to be read on any device or printed out.

After all, the book was written to be read and with a story and messages meant to be shared.