Helsinki Accords
Thirty-five countries signed the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975, and the human rights clause turned out to matter most. The Soviet Union had wanted a European security conference since the 1950s in order to have the postwar borders recognised, particularly the ones in Poland and Germany, and this was the price of getting it. The document is divided into three baskets. The first covers security and the inviolability of frontiers, which is what Moscow came for; the second covers economic, scientific and technical cooperation; and the third covers humanitarian questions — family reunification, freer movement of people and information, and cultural exchange. Principle VII of the first basket commits every signatory to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms including freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. Western negotiators regarded that as a concession they had extracted and did not expect much from it, and the Soviet leadership regarded it as harmless language of the kind treaties always contain. Both were wrong. The text was published in full in the Soviet press because the government was pleased with the border clauses, and dissidents in Moscow, Prague, Warsaw and elsewhere formed monitoring groups to check compliance against a document their own governments had signed and printed. Charter 77 came out of it, and so did the Moscow Helsinki Group, whose members went to prison. The follow-up conferences gave the West a standing forum in which to raise names. Brezhnev's officials came to regard the third basket as their worst diplomatic mistake. The act was not a treaty and bound nobody legally, which is precisely why it worked. A political commitment published by a government to its own people is harder to disown than a legal one it can argue about, and the monitoring groups made that the entire point.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
