Excerpts from this morning's paper:

By Jimmy Carter
Friday, May 14, 2004; Page A25


To ensure that additional human rights embarrassments will not befall the United States, we must examine well-known, high-level and broad-based U.S. policies that have lowered our nation's commitment to basic human rights.

Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, many traumatized and fearful U.S. citizens accepted Washington's new approach with confidence that our leaders would continue to honor international agreements and human rights standards.

But in many nations, defenders of human rights were the first to feel the consequences of these changes, and international humanitarian organizations began expressing deep concern to each other and to high-level U.S. military and government officials about the adverse impact of the new American policies, and to promulgate reports of actual abuses.

Some of their recommendations were quite specific, calling for vigilant independent monitoring of U.S. detention facilities and strict enforcement of Geneva Convention guidelines. Others were more general, describing the impact of these policies on defenders of freedom and human rights around the world. These expressions of concern have been mostly ignored until recently, when photographs of prisoner abuse let Americans finally see some of the consequences of our government's policies in graphic, human terms.

These American decisions had an immediate global impact. In response to urgent requests from human rights defenders from many countries, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I agreed that it would be helpful to hear directly from a representative group. After the high commissioner's tragic death in Iraq last August, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed Bertrand Ramcharan to serve as my co-chair, and in November 2003 the Carter Center brought together leaders of human rights and democracy movements from 41 nations.

We learned from these nonviolent activists that U.S. policies are giving license to abusive governments and even established democracies to stamp out legitimate dissent and reverse decades of progress toward freedom, with many leaders retreating from previous human rights commitments. Lawyers, professors, doctors and journalists told of being labeled as terrorists, often for merely criticizing a government policy or carrying out their daily work. Equally disturbing are reports that in some countries the U.S. government has pushed regressive counterterrorism laws, based on the USA Patriot Act, that undermine democratic principles and the rule of law. Some American policies are being challenged by Congress and the federal courts, but the reversal of such troubling policies is unlikely in countries where legislative and judicial checks and balances are not well developed.

We decided to share the disturbing findings with the media and public officials. In addition to a one-hour roundtable discussion on CNN, participants from Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), the Carter Center, and defenders from Egypt, Kenya and Liberia went to Washington and met with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz; the undersecretary of state for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky; and legislative leaders. The group also participated in a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and met with editors of the New York Times and The Post.

In each case, the adverse impact of new U.S. policies on the protection of freedom and human rights was described with specific proof and human experiences. These officials listened attentively and promised to consider ways to alleviate the problem. As subsequent events have revealed, there were no significant reforms at the highest levels of our government.