Humanity has moves ahead in Britain

LONDON: How goes it with the "ethical dimension"? It's 14 months since Robin Cook's "mission statement" added it to British foreign policy, and a year since he announced that human rights would be "at the center" of that policy. It was plain at the start that Mr. Cook was taking a big fat risk, inviting merciless scrutiny. So it has turned out -- in Britain.

But abroad, where foreign policy happens, they still admire Mr. Cook and what he does. This is not just enduring relief that the raw national egoism of the 18 Tory years is over. It is recognition that the British, especially during their presidency of the European Union, have shown vigor and at times leadership in forcing a human rights dimension into international agreements and institutions. Only the British media -- left-wing or right- wing -- insist that the "ethical dimension" has been a hypocritical fiasco. Teasing the prickly Mr. Cook and predicting his downfall has become a hobby for columnists.

"Unforgiving scrutiny" is fine. Achievements such as the new regime on land mines, the code on arms exports or last month's establishment of the International Criminal Court stagger into reality riddled with loopholes. Revealing this, loudly, is right. But there are woods as well as trees here. The big point about the Court, for instance, is not that the Americans (with appalling, revealing arrogance) joined Libya and China to reject it. Neither is it that Mr. Cook's Cabinet rivals seem to have ganged up to weaken the Court's prosecuting arm.

The point is that the Court will happen. Half a century after Nuremburg, there is now a universal criminal tribunal. It will have its hours of shame and impotence. But humanity has moved ahead by one decisive ratchet-click. That deserves fireworks on the Thames, not sneers in the tabloids.

Amnesty International is publishing its own audit of the Government's record on human rights in September. On details, it will often be highly critical. An Amnesty spokesman told me: "The Government took a key role in getting the European Union to sign the Code of Conduct on controlling arms sales... But the Labour administration has approved at least 64 separate arms export licenses to Indonesia and at least 86 to Turkey, covering equipment which those countries have a long record of using for repression".

Criticisms like this have been repeatedly hurled at Robin Cook, on the grounds that he has made compromises that subordinate ethics to trade. But Amnesty International insists we are looking at blemishes on an essentially fine idea. "(We) welcome Robin Cook's commitment to put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. It is certainly not true that this commitment has been fruitless." It is particularly happy about Britain's part in setting up the International Criminal Court, about the final abolition of the death penalty, and about the Government's decision to report annually on its performance in promoting human rights.

Mr. Cook's enemies made much of two cases in which he was supposed to have made an undiplomatic fool of himself: his visit with Palestinians to the Israeli settlement at Har Homa, on the West Bank, and his remark in India that the Kashmir problem could do with international mediation. But he was right both times. At Har Homa, he acted to protest against a suicidal Israeli policy endangering peace. Over Kashmir, his words were rapidly justified by nuclear tests. It would be hard to invent a better demonstration of why the world needs to get involved in Kashmir.

The going gets muddier when it comes to the so-called "third way" in foreign policy. According to Mr. Cook, this way avoids the extremes of "kowtow" (appeasement) or "row" (confrontation). But it is an ill-marked path, which tends to become invisible at awkward moments. What exactly is Britain achieving, when it invites Chinese prison governors to study Western jails, or runs training courses for judges? When China is coaxed into signing international protocols on human rights, is it a high-minded illusion to think that a piece of paper changes anything real? "Constructive engagement", as this used to be called, was much debated during the Cold War. Optimists argued that trade and contact, accompanied by lectures about the wickedness of locking up critics, were a sort of sugared arsenic pill that would gradually poison the monster from within. Pessimists retorted that the monster would simply grow more confident.

Nobody won that argument, because the Communist system collapsed so suddenly. But the balance of evidence, at least in east-central Europe, is that contacts and exchanges did something to hasten the collapse. Economically, they created expectations which the system could not satisfy. Socially, they disaffected a bureaucratic class who learned that out there things were done differently -- and better.

China is discouraging. The dragon swallows container-loads of sugared pills, with no apparent signs of discomfort. On one hand, the leaders experiment with press conferences at which the questions don't have to be submitted in advance. On the other, they continue to slaughter criminals like rats, devastate Tibet, torture critics and maintain a carp-tank of political prisoners in order to sell them, soul by soul, to visitors like Mr. Cook.

And yet even the paper protocols matter more than they seem to. The human-rights section of the Helsinki Accords was signed by the Soviet Union with fingers crossed. But it turned out to give a voice to tiny groups of dissidents, who used the Accords to raise hell for their rights. Chinese Communism will be overthrown in the next few years -- for Chinese reasons, not because of anything we do. But it will then turn out that the people who make that revolution use human-rights language, and have a working knowledge of democratic practice.

The "ethical dimension" has given a new background color to British foreign policy. That amounts to success. But it is also why the failures in application stand out so clearly. The central failure is the continuing immunity and secrecy of the arms trade and its licensing. Another, however, is the scandal of asylum, only slightly improved by last week's promise to clear the backlog. Formally, this is Home Office business. But the truth is that asylum policy is foreign policy. Those we admit today as political refugees will one day be running a free country -- with warm memories of the land that once helped and protected them.

This is the place where human rights and national self- interest meet. Not a bad place for Mr. Cook to stand.

-- Observer News Service