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SPEECH
BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR GEOFFREY HOWE Q.C., M.P., SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS TO THE CLOSING SESSION OF THE VIENNA CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND CO-OPERATION IN EUROPE FOLLOW-UP MEETING, 17 JANUARY 1989
Mr. Chairman, may I begin by extending our thanks to our Austrian hosts, for the exemplary arrangements they have made throughout the period of this meeting. We shall shortly be returning to try their patience in yet another CSCE forum. They have set a very high standard for future hosts to emulate.
Two years after we assembled here to inaugurate this, the third Helsinki Review Meeting, we have reached consensus on a final document and the question it is worth asking is: "What is the significance of our agreement for ordinary people in our respective countries?" Because that after all is the real test of our achievement.
Alas war and injustice are no strangers to our continent. It is partly for that very reason that the quest for justice and freedom, of which the CSCE is part, has been so intense and persistent.
Less than 50 years ago our fundamental freedoms were placed in peril by a malign partnership of Stalinism and Naziism. Freedom on our continent was saved only at a cost of millions of lives. In the darkest days, until Hitler had turned on his former ally, the flame of freedom was kept alive in Britain. It gave hope to patriotic men and women fighting right across our continent for liberation of their countries. All of us were able to play some part in helping to overcome the wartime threat. The peoples of Russia and of Eastern Europe fought as bravely for their freedom as their allies in the West.
It was during those hard days that together we prepared the ground on which a common European home might be built. What in fact arose was a divided house. In the West we founded the Council of Europe to consolidate democracy and freedom, to safeguard human rights on a European scale. The subsequent European Convention on Human Rights was not just a clearly defined declaration, it also established effective machinery, the European Commission and Court of Human Rights, machinery with which to enforce and uphold those rights.
Now many of our countries are more closely linked than ever to the institutions of the European Community, bulwark of liberty, democracy and prosperity for 12 nations.
But while Western Europe was building freedom in diversity, the Eastern half of our continent was suffering uniformity in repression, ask the people of Hungary in 1956, the people of Czechoslovakia in 1968, or the people of Poland in 1981. This is the deep divide which 14 years ago the Helsinki Final Act was designed to bridge. The Helsinki process is about safeguarding Europe, all of Europe, from any strengthening or any resurgence of those repressive, destructive forces. It is about giving permanence to the principles of justice and freedom which alone can assure our peace and prosperity.
They are principles whose roots are found far back in our common history. The ideas of natural law and rights were developed by the Greek and Latin Stoics, by Roman Lawyers, by Judaeo-Christian teachers. They provided the basis for belief in the freedom and equality of all men. The concept of a society, governed by law, that attached value not simply to its rulers but also to the ruled.
The evolution of our modern democracies from these beginnings has been a slow process. Often it has been uncertain. Different countries have followed different paths.
In my own country we have quietly but steadily established the foundations of our freedom in the tradition of the common law. Only 80 years after the city of Vienna received its Charter, in 1215 AD, Magna Carta gave us the basis of a system of justice, independent of executive authority. Six years after the last great siege of Vienna by Turkish armies in 1689, the Bill of Rights, codified in law the freedoms of all Englishmen.
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