Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 99 Part 1.djvu/202

 99 STAT. 180

PUBLIC LAW 99-79—AUG. 2, 1985 Public Law 99-79 99th Congress Joint Resolution

Aug. 2, 1985 [S.J. Res. 180]

Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act.

Whereas, on August 1, 1975, the United States joined thirty-four other nations, including the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact states, as signatories to the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Final Act, and Whereas, the Final Act is a balanced document incorporating provisions concerning human rights and fundamental freedoms, military security, cooperation in the fields of economic, scientific, cultural and educational affairs, free flow of information, and humanitarian affairs, and Whereas, the Helsinki process has evolved into the primary tool of East-West human rights diplomacy and continues to serve as a beacon of hope to victims of oppression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Whereas, the United States, our NATO Allies and a number of neutral and nonaligned countries have documented and protested many serious violations of the human rights and human contacts provisions of the Final Act by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact states, and Whereas, the Soviet Union displays contempt for basic civil and political rights, such as freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief; confines in prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions or internally exiles hundreds of citizens who have sought to know and act upon their rights, among them thirtyseven imprisoned members of Helsinki monitoring groups, and Whereas, the Soviet Union callously disregards its pledge to facilitate human contacts and has drastically reduced the numbers of Soviet citizens permitted to emigrate; has consistently denied exit permission to Soviet citizens married to United States citizens and to other individuals who have claims to United States citizenship; and deliberately impedes the East-West flow of information by jamming Western radio broadcasts, and Whereas, disregard for human rights also is evident in the other Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe, and Whereas, inter alia, Bulgaria maintains virtually total control over the life of its people and recently has engaged in a campaign of forcible assimilation aimed at the Turkish minority population; Czechoslovakia harshly represses independent social, political, religious, minority and cultural expression and persecutes members of Charter '77 and VONS (Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted); The German Democratic Republic enforces

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