CSCEを通じた人権問題の争点化

ソ連反体制派とアメリカ議会の接点

抄録

The Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe) in 1975 included human rights clauses as one of the “Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States.” The idea of the CSCE consisting of 35 participating states, including United States and Soviet Union, was originally proposed by the East, aiming at keeping the status-quo of the post-war Europe. However, after the Helsinki, the West took the initiative to review the CSCE process, especially on human rights implementation in the East. Throughout this study, I try to explain who found the Helsinki Final Act as a tool of making pressure on the East around human rights issues. At first Soviet dissidents found its significance, and they tried to inform the West of serious situations of human rights, based on the Helsinki Final Act. At second, U.S. Congressmen visited the Soviet Union before and after the Helsinki to see the human rights situations including the Jewish migration issue. In Moscow, they could receive the appeals directly from Soviet dissidents, in spite of negative reactions from the Soviet authority and from the U.S. State Department. Soviets did not report the fact of the ‘human rights debate’ between the U.S. Congressmen and Soviet counterparts. The State Department did not find much interest in human rights issues as a U.S.-Soviet bilateral relation at the time, and Secretary of State Kissinger tried to neglect the significance of human rights clauses. Though the State Department was extremely negative, President Ford, who ran in the election campaign, signed the act of founding the Helsinki Commission to monitor the Helsinki process, in the Congress, tried to meet the expectations of ethnic lobbies. By reviewing the interconnectedness between Soviet dissidents and U.S. Congress, this study seeks to explain how the human rights issue became serious in the CSCE process. In doing so, this study attempts to make it clear that these changes of human rights politics in the CSCE had been already archived before the U.S. presidential election was held in 1976 and before the human rights diplomacy was launched in 1977 by President Carter, which made the U.S.-Soviet confrontation irreversible. Soviet dissidents and U.S. Congressmen, who had been, before the Helsinki, situated far from the Helsinki, became the mighty groups who tempted to let Soviets keep human rights clauses of the Helsinki Final Act.