Globalizing Human Rights Private Citizens, the Soviet Union, and the West by Christian Philip Peterson - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Christian Peterson
خلاصه: During the late 1960s and 1970s, the world watched as the United States, Soviet Union, and various European governments worked to reduce ten- sions and improve relations with each other by pursuing a policy known as détente. This process appeared to bear fruit when the United States, Canada, and thirty-three European nations, including the Soviet Union, signed the Final Act (Helsinki Accords) on 1 August 1975. Negotiated within a framework known as the Conference on Security and Coopera- tion in Europe (CSCE), this agreement pledged signatories to respect the basic human rights and fundamental freedoms of private citizens, as well as promote the free flow of information, ideas, and people across national boundaries. It also called on each nation to recognize the legitimacy of existing borders in Europe save the possibility of “peaceful change” in the future. At the time, many in the United States saw this document as a vic- tory for the USSR that sanctioned Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev lent credence to this view when he referred to the Final Act as “the culmination of everything posi- tive that has been done thus far on our continent to bring about the change from the ‘cold war’ to détente and the genuine implementation of the prin- ciples of peaceful coexistence.