At a meeting in the European Parliament on 11/12 May 2000 to consider the proposal for a European Conference on Peace and Human Rights, the following appeal was agreed.
After the war in Yugoslavia, and the sidelining of the United Nations, there has been a marked deterioration in international relations.
This adverse development has not been offset by gains in human rights, either in the Balkans or further afield. To the contrary, ethnic divisions have been intensified, crime and lawless behaviour have increased, and people have fewer rights, and less control over the course of their lives, than ever before. At the same time, new threats have widened.
In particular, the threat to peace is now fearfully increased by nuclear doctrines of first use. This long-held and dangerous commitment in the USA and Nato has been matched by the Putin Doctrine in Russia, ratified on 21st April 2000. Henceforward, the Russian armed forces will deploy nuclear weapons in a more active mode, “in response to large-scale aggression involving conventional weapons in situations that are critical for the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies”. Further dangers loom following recent moves by the USA to deploy the so-called “national missile defence” or “son of star wars”, which may well lead to nuclear weapons in space, and would break the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty.
Nuclear confrontation, reviving the discredited idea of limited nuclear warfare, will once again bring terror into international relations, as a workaday part of the new international order. In this context, democracy itself will be threatened, and the very idea of security undermined. The idea that human rights could be upheld by military intervention was never very plausible. Nuclear intervention is even more unthinkable.
Facing this dire prospect, we invite other Europeans, peace organisations and human rights proponents to come together to consider rational alternatives which can sustain peace and human rights, and to work for military disengagement and the annulment of nuclear confrontation. We commend the idea of a nuclear-free zone in Europe, as a step to global nuclear disarmament.
I endorse the Russell Appeal for a European Conference on Peace and Human Rights and a nuclear-free zone in Europe.
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