No American political leader has done more to advance human rights as an integral element of U.S. policy than Jimmy Carter. He called human rights “the soul of our foreign policy.” Carter’s commitment flowed naturally from his experience growing up in rural Georgia, where he saw “the effects of a system of deprivation of rights.” His embrace of human rights drew on his deep religious faith and commitment to equality, buoyed by what he saw as the “cleansing energies that were released when my own region of this country walked out of darkness.”
In his inaugural address as governor in 1971, Carter proclaimed, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” Ahead of his time and to the consternation of many political leaders in attendance that day, he stressed that “no poor, rural, weak or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job or simple justice.” As governor he recruited a number of African Americans to serve on various state commissions and boards, including the first African American to serve on the Board of Regents of the University of Georgia.
Six years later in his inaugural address as president, Carter underscored the importance human rights would play in his administration’s foreign policy. “Because we are free,” he said, “we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.” As Jonathan Alter wrote in his excellent book His Very Best: Jimmy Carter a Life from day one Carter began integrating human rights in ways large and small. In his first week in office, he received a note from Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning scientist, seeking U.S. advocacy for political prisoners there. Carter wrote to Sakharov, emphasizing the centrality of human rights to his administration. Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev responded furiously, telling Carter that Moscow would not tolerate “interference in our internal affairs, whatever pseudo-humanitarian slogans are used to present it.” Years later, Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to Washington, conceded that Carter’s support for human rights activists “played a significant role” in loosening the Soviet grip at home and among its Eastern European satellites.
At the State Department, Carter appointed Patricia Derian, a civil rights activist from Mississippi, to head a new bureau devoted to human rights. This bureau had been mandated by Congress in the waning days of the Ford Administration, despite opposition from the old order at the State Department. What made Derian’s appointment more galling to the diplomatic establishment was Carter’s decision to situate this new bureau on the seventh floor of the main State Department building, just down the hall from the Secretary of State’s office, where it still resides five decades later.
Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, sent Derian to Latin America, ushering in a new strain of U.S. foreign policy in places like Argentina and Chile where thousands of people had “disappeared” because of their opposition to military dictatorships. In these and other countries where gross human rights violations were commonplace, U.S. policymakers before Carter had largely turned a blind eye to these abuses, prioritizing strategic and economic interests. While not abandoning those traditional interests, Carter had the courage to promote human rights, recognizing that in doing so he would complicate U.S. foreign policy.
As a framework for this shift, he issued Presidential Directive 30, which stipulated that “countries with a good or substantially improving record of human rights observance will be given special consideration in the allocation of U.S. foreign assistance, just as countries with a poor or deteriorating record will receive less favorable consideration.” This led to protracted battles between old school realists and newly empowered human rights advocates within the government. These bureaucratic battles played out with respect to countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As one manifestation of Carter’s commitment, his administration began to oppose loans from international financial institutions to rights-abusing governments, promising to provide financial support only after these countries demonstrated concrete improvements on human rights.
Balancing concerns for human rights with other policy interests was difficult, and bold human rights initiatives were routinely derailed by officials in the State Department and other agencies, frustrating Carter and those around him. He realized that he had greater latitude to provide a lifeline of protection to individual human rights champions. One notable example was his administration’s extensive diplomacy to save the life of Kim Dae-jung, a prominent political dissident in South Korea, who later became the country’s president.
Carter and Derian were particularly active in Latin America, for example securing the release of Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine newspaper publisher, after he had spent more than two years in prison. Carter devoted special attention to these and many other individual cases. He acted on a philosophy that lasting change must be led by people from within each society. He understood that the most important role for outsiders is to provide support and protection for these efforts.
After leaving office, as Carter designed his presidential library and the Carter Center in Atlanta, he was determined to give human rights a prominent place. I was honored to be part of a small group of human rights activists he convened in the early 1980s to discuss the shape of this program and to work with Carter and his team. With the support of philanthropist Dominique de Menil, he created an annual human rights prize for leading activists from around the world. He recruited a prominent legal scholar and international judge, Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor, to be the first director of the human rights program. Buergenthal was succeeded in 1994 by Harry Barnes, a respected former U.S. ambassador who played an instrumental role supporting the democratic opposition to General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
As Carter is laid to rest this week, we should reflect on three core beliefs that motivated his commitment to human rights. The first was his deep personal and religious commitment to equality, dignity, justice and fairness. Human rights were not an abstraction to Jimmy Carter; they were values that defined who he was as a person and how he lived his life. He was a pragmatic idealist, inclined to engage with rights violating leaders rather than condemn them publicly, but his moral compass always pointed true north.
Second, he had a deep belief in the post-World War order the U.S. helped to shape and the institutions that were created to sustain that order. Carter was a young Navy officer as the United Nations, the World Bank and other pillars of the peacetime order were taking shape. He took special note of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, recognizing how significant it was that countries across the globe had endorsed, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, a “Magna Carta” for people everywhere, universalizing rights and asserting that each of us is entitled to these rights by virtue of our humanity.
Finally, though not a passivist, Carter devoted much of his life to promoting peace. He saw the three legs of the UN stool– ensuring global security, promoting economic development and protecting core human rights as essential components of the effort to prevent armed conflict. In places like Haiti and Sudan, Carter’s commitment to engaging with rights-violating leaders in pursuit of conflict resolution was often in tension with publicly denouncing their abuses. We had some lively discussions on this topic, but Carter was always open to debating the best way forward. In our world today, where the number of armed conflicts is increasing, now more than 100, finding the right balance between engaging with rights violators in the pursuit of peace and holding them accountable for their actions continues to be a challenge.
This week, as we reflect on Carter’s extraordinary life and celebrate the values that characterized his many decades of public service, let us re-dedicate ourselves to pursuing his vision and to sustaining his commitment to building more peaceful international relations rooted in the pursuit of equality, justice and fairness. While much of what he stood for may seem almost quaint and out of date in our own country and in our sharply polarized world, in fact his vision is more relevant and important than ever.