We are weeks away from the 2018 midterm elections, with serious concerns about Russian meddling as American voters go to the polls. We have just watched Russia undertake a massive war game, Vostok 2018. The exercise was Russia’s largest in the post-Soviet era and was on a scale not seen since 1981, when Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union and a new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, was just completing his first year in the White House. Russian troops continue to occupy parts of Ukraine and Georgia, and Russia conducts campaigns in Syria even as its bombers continue to buzz the Alaskan coastline.
Russia’s aggressive external actions are rightly capturing the world’s attention. At the same time, Russia’s internal repression must remain on our radar screens and on Washington’s foreign policy agenda.
This wasn’t always the case. Before World War Two, non-interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries was a ruling principle in foreign policy. Following Hitler’s rise in Germany, a speech in Berlin by U.S. Ambassador William Dodd indirectly criticized Germany’s policy toward the Jews. For his intervention Dodd earned a rebuke from his boss in Washington, Undersecretary William Phillips: “An ambassador, who is a privileged guest of the country to which he is accredited, should be careful not to give public expression to anything of criticism,” because he could “lose the goodwill of the officials who are so important to the success of their mission.” To the State Department of that time, the priority was to get Germany to pay its debt to U.S. bondholders. No internal human rights issue -- even the incipient genocide of the Jews -- was considered appropriate for a resident ambassador.
It wasn’t until World War II that we recognized that internal repression went hand-in-hand with external aggression. Ultimately, the concept of human rights as an international concern -- the idea that security among states depends on respect for human rights within states -- became enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.
With Helsinki, peacetime public defense of fundamental freedoms no longer stopped at the border’s edge. For the United States in particular, foreign policy became imbued with our founding principle -- that, in the words of our Declaration, all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Protecting human rights defenders became a cornerstone of diplomacy after Helsinki, but it would not have been so had it not been embraced by the next two presidents. Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. leader to declare, in 1977, that “commitment to human rights is a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.” Carter created the first human rights bureau in the State Department and was the first president to meet with Soviet dissidents like Vladimir Bukovsky. And with a home in the bureaucracy, human rights promotion became central to U.S. foreign policy.
The bipartisan nature of this new imperative established itself with the second president in this story: Ronald Reagan made an explicit linkage between progress in respect for human rights, and progress in the bilateral relationship with Moscow. The promotion of fundamental freedoms and the protection of their advocates now occupied a central place in our foreign policy.
Presidents may vary in their focus, but human rights promotion has become mainstream in the State Department, and speaking out for those who are persecuted is part of our diplomacy, when the individual is persecuted for expressing views the state does not approve.
Consider Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker who spoke out about Russia’s unilateral annexation of Crimea. Arrested in 2015, Sentsov was taken to Russia, where he was made a Russian citizen, tried in a Russian military court, convicted of terrorism, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Even from his cell, Sentsov is fighting for freedom of speech. He has been on a hunger strike since May, calling for the freedom of 64 of his fellow political prisoners.
Or take Alexey Pichugin. According to the Memorial Human Rights Center, Russia’s leading human rights foundation, Pichugin is Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner. Pichugin has been held by the Kremlin for 15 years on trumped-up charges as part of Putin’s campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other leaders of the Yukos oil company. The European Court of Human Rights has issued two judgments calling his conviction and imprisonment contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights.
There is a straight line from internal human rights abuses to gross violations of sovereignty. States that do not respect equal justice before the law have no qualms invading their neighbors or using weapons of mass destruction to murder their opponents overseas. That is why -- in Russia as in any autocratic regime -- the plight of each individual prisoner of conscience is our concern as well. By fighting for them, we are fighting for our own security, and for their freedom as well as our own.
Former Ambassador to Georgia Ian Kelly served as U.S. Representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and in a range of senior positions at the Department of State, including director of the Office of Russian Affairs. This oped is based on his comments at the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York City. The views expressed are the author's own.
