Human Rights

Atlanta.--President Clinton's decision to unhitch trade and human rights in U.S.-Chinese relations was sound on its merits, and additionally fitting because, alas, a little modesty on human rights increasingly behooves us. The American record is coming under cautious but growing international scrutiny, and it is weak at key points.The president's attempt to wrestle China into a better rights posture was a reaction to the obscene indifference with which the Bush administration shrugged off China's massacre of students and murder of democracy at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

LONDON -- Do we so quickly have to repeat history, the first time as a near tragedy, the second as what would be farce, if it didn't emanate from such a serious source?Last week, the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, speaking at the annual forum of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, called for a review and possible re-write of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. The declaration, he declared, "was formulated by superpowers which did not understand the needs of poor countries."

The death this month of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator whose secret police killed and tortured thousands of dissidents, helped seal 2006 as the most fateful year for war criminals and other human rights violators since the Nuremberg trials of 1946. But, at the same time, the docket of human-rights crimes is growing larger and more ill-defined than ever. Just as the nature of human rights violations is evolving, so must the international community's response. The International Criminal Court at The Hague will need extra resources to handle all of its cases and adjudicate the messier ones.

President Barack Obama's China policy combines deterrence and engagement, but it gives insufficient attention to human rights. Since early 2009, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that human rights "can't interfere" with other aspects of Sino-American relations, the administration has tried to avoid public discussion of the issue. Over the past year, the Obama administration has increased attention and resources devoted to East Asia. Expanded military cooperation with Australia and the Philippines, a robust Japanese-American defense relationship, and enhanced naval and air forces in the region illustrate Washington's efforts to counter China's growing assertiveness and military power.

- Legislation by Sen. Ben Cardin to pressure Russia on human rights abuses is expected to win approval in Congress Thursday despite concerns that it will hurt already tenuous U.S. relations with the Kremlin. The proposal - which requires the State Department to maintain a public list of human rights abusers in Russia and freeze their assets - has received bipartisan support in the House and Senate even though the Obama administration has largely resisted the effort. Because the language is tucked into a trade bill that is a priority for Russia and U.S. businesses, President Obama is expected to sign the measure if sent to his desk.

Only 300 miles from Sarajevo, another battle front is openingup in Vienna that will further test America's global leadership. This time the confrontation won't be military but ideological: who gets to define the meaning and content of human rights.At the World Conference on Human Rights, the U.S. will find itself under attack for the first time over its human-rights policies from a coalition of developing countries spearheaded by China.Zhang Yishan, deputy leader of China's delegation, has already signaled the coming confrontation by demanding that the U.N. ''consider the rights of poorer countries to survival and development and stop using human rights as an excuse for interfering in the internal affairs of nations.

Vienna.--The struggle over whether the Dalai Lama should be allowed to appear at the World Conference on Human Rights single-handedly crystallized all the hard issues at stake here.More than that, it forced those Asian countries that are the principal antagonists to further progress on developing a more ambitious U.N. consensus on human rights to face up to the intellectual weaknesses in their argument in a way the Western nations or Amnesty International and the other non-governmental organizations could never have pushed them to on their own.The Dalai Lama was finally allowed to speak on U.N. territory only after the most tremendous public row that, at one point, threatened to stall the conference in its tracks.

OVER THE last 20 years, public respect for human rights has grown by leaps and bounds. Media coverage has raised public awareness, spreading the good word through nightly broadcasts and articles. From 1981 to 2000, references to "human rights" in two leading news magazines jumped by more than 130 percent, and recently, American opinion polls have found widespread public support for human rights-friendly policies abroad. But some argue that Western coverage of abuses may be biased since some countries attract more criticism than others.

Boston. -- These are times when Americans have to slip a new set of lenses into an old pair of frames.The political prescription that we wore for so long produced a kind of Cold War myopia. For almost 50 years, we pictured the world in terms of East and West, the Soviet Union and America. It was virtually all we could see.Now we are looking out again. The people and the problems that were once just outside our peripheral vision have come into clear view.Indeed Monday, International Women's Day, will mark a ''see-change'' in our understanding of the harsh realities of women's lives.

London. -- While President Clinton trips to Seattle to consort with Pacific Asian leaders on questions mainly economic, some of the very same Asians are log-jamming a proposal to establish the post of a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.They did this in Vienna during the World Conference on Human Rights in June; now they are at it again. The hard-liners are a minority of only five or six -- Indonesia, China, Singapore, Malaysia and perhaps Thailand. Not with them are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, and probably not even Cambodia.