Science and Human Rights (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Does a focus on human rights undermine efforts toward international scientific cooperation, development, political stability, or nuclear disarmament? Why does the committee work only in behalf of scientists and how do scientists become victims of human rights violations?
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Among the points listed are recommendations that governments should demonstrate their total opposition to torture; adopt safeguards to ensure torture does not occur in incommunicado detention; ensure that prisoners are held in publicly recognized places; estate fish safeguards during interrogation and custody; ensure unpartial investigations of complaints; disqualify confessions obtained through torture; prosecute alleged torturers; provide financial compensation to victims and their dependents; intercede with governments accused of torture; and ratify international instruments against torture. Unless governments are held accountable for their actions, there is little impetus for them to change.
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An article by physicist John Zieman considers the involvement of scientists in human rights through the use of the human rights instruments discussed earlier. Many of the difficulties of achieving transnational solidarity in the world scientific community are .
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A physician in Chile, following his release from prison, wrote: "I want to thank the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences for the forceful and quick action it took with regard to my latest detention.... Generous attitudes, effectiveness and solidarity such as yours, engenders my respect and affection, and 3Zieman, John, Paul Sieghart, and John Humphrey, 17`c World of Scicnec and the Rule of Law, Oxford University Press, 1986, p.
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The three main speakers representing markedly different cultures and political backgrounds raised their arms spontaneously and joined hands to the thunderous applause of the audience. Many in attendance had made written and oral appeals in behalf of the former prisoners who spoke.
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The World Medical Association defines torture in the 1975 Declaration of Tokyo as The deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason. In the Soviet Union, although the practice of psychiatric abuse has sharply diminished in recent months, hundreds of political d~sidents and others have been confined to special psychiatric hospitals and administered mind-altering psychiatric drugs as a form of punishment.
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One well-known example is the case brought by Argentine newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman against an Argentine physician, Dr. Jorge Antonio Berges, who was a police doctor during Timerman's detention.
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However, hundreds of other middle and lower ranking military officers accused of similar crimes were granted immunity under the "law on due obediences because they claimed they were "obeying orders" when they were involved in repression. In Chile, in response to information provided to the committee by medical colleagues there regarding detention, internal exile, torture, and disappearance, a delegation was sent to Santiago in 1985 to gather information and make appeals to government officials.
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Anatoly Koryagin, a Soviet psychiatrist, who spent six years in a Soviet labor camp after documenting abuses of 6For further information on torture in Chile, please see CHR's report entitled Scientists and Human Rights in Chile, Report of a Delegation.
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HUMAN RIGHTS, HUMAN NEEDS, AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM As Gilbert White points out in his introduction to this section, it is perhaps easier to define torture, to identify malpractice, and to suggest means to cope with them than to handle some of the other aspects of human rights violations.
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After spending considerable time examining the various rights and evaluating what concrete and realistic contributions it can make toward helping individuals achieve them, the committee decided it should focus on civil and political rights, the negative rights. Lipman Bers, the second chair of the Committee on Human Rights, defines the right to food, to a job, to medical care, and to education as "positive" rights.
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About health care, he says: "While the vast mass of our youth lack the most elementary knowledge of health and hygiene, they are the victims of disease, of malnutrition and poverty. Lipman Bers, in ending his comments, points out that, while the Committee on Human Rights recognizes the importance of positive rights, there is a good reason why the international human rights movement, of which our committee is a small part, has concentrated on negative rights: It makes sense to tell a government: 'Stop torturing people.' An order by the prime minister or the president, or whoever is in charge, could make it happen.
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While we have seen a gradual acceptance of the importance of respecting and defending human rights, we have also been faced with an increasing awareness of and concern over the ever present threat to human survival a general nuclear war between the two superpowers. Because of the horrendous global consequences should a nuclear war occur, the need to preserve peace has become a major issue in our lives and the focus of many scientific meetings and exchanges.
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This view was particularly apparent when the committee recommended sanctions by the academy against the Soviet Academy of Sciences when academician Sakharov, a foreign associate of the academy, was sent into exile in Gorky in 1980. The committee went to great pains, however, to specify that joint meetings on arms control and disarmament should be exempted from the sanctions.
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But we should not insist upon human rights unprovements as a condition for more peaceful relations." In his paper, Dr. Yuri OrIov suggests that steps be taken to encourage openness in Soviet society because, "if Soviet society were to become as open as the West, East-West tension would be substantially reduced and mutual security thereby increased." Many issues are discussed in the following pages of this report.
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