Establishing a Viable Human Rights Policy

Abstract

THE CARTER HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY How Carter administration came to be outspokenly committed to cause of human rights is far from clear. As Daniel Patrick Moyni han has observed, Human rights as an issue in foreign policy was by no means central to Jimmy Carter's campaign for presidency. It was raised in Democratic platform drafting committee, and at Democratic Convention, but in each instance Carter representatives were at best neutral, giving impression of not having heard very much of matter before and not having any particular views. Indeed, some of candidate Carter's remarks suggested that he was far from wedded to an activist human rights policy. Our people have now learned, he told Foreign Policy Association in June 1976, the folly of our trying to inject our power into internal affairs of other nations.