Human Rights

She first felt the pull during the '60s, when she was a teacher at St. Joseph's College in Manila and her students began gathering in the streets to clamor for social change. She was already in her middle years, a Franciscan nun secure in the placid world of academia. For a while, she only watched and listened to the anger outside, then decided to join her voice to it. Sister Mariani Dimaranan has not been quiet since. Her pupils still flocked to her, to learn not about algebra but economic deprivation, to read not classic literature but leaflets on injustices perpetrated by the government of Ferdinand Marcos.

Tomorrow, Harry Belafonte - singer, actor, activist, ageless hunk - will receive the inaugural Marian Anderson Award as part of the Sunoco Welcome America! festivities. Named after the famous Philadelphia contralto, the prize includes a $100,000 honorarium. A committee chaired by film director Jonathan Demme selected the 71-year-old Belafonte. "Harry Belafonte exemplified in the strongest possible ways the quality the panel wants to honor," said Patrick Moran, executive director of Philadelphia Festival of the Arts Inc., which is producing the Anderson award events.

Ruth Bascom, a potent force in human rights and political causes who wasn't afraid to be a majority of one, died Sunday. She was 56 and lived in North Philadelphia. Ruth Bascom was the kind of person who strides into a roomful of people and even strangers know that she must be a somebody. And anyone in a room with Ruth Bascom for more than five minutes soon found out who she was and what she stood for - from Ruth. Among other endeavors, she dedicated much of her adult life to human rights.

Mabel G. Turner, a champion of human rights who broke race and gender barriers as the first woman appointed assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, died Aug. 2 of complications associated with Alzheimer's disease. She was 94. Turner had lived in North Philadelphia for more than 50 years and practiced law in Philadelphia for more than 40, serving women, other African-Americans, and her profession well. She was the second black woman to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1949 and in 1956, was appointed the first assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The United Nations General Assembly faces an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen its rightful leadership role in promoting and defending the fragile cause of human rights. The U.N. World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna last June should be seen as a catalyst for a dramatic move to strengthen the incredibly weak mechanisms in the U.N. system for preventing and correcting human rights crimes. While the United Nations has an excellent record of setting human-rights standards through international covenants, the failure of many countries to comply with these standards and the reluctance of the world community to provide the U.N. Center for Human Rights with adequate resources to carry out its mandate have had tragic results.

During last year's presidential campaign, Bill Clinton attacked George Bush for "coddling" Chinese "dictators" who ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre. Today, President Clinton will meet with one of those "dictators" - Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin - at a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders in Seattle. The meeting illustrates a Clinton administration policy shift away from threats over human-rights violations and toward more intensive engagement with China. That turnabout has caused some to charge that Mr. Clinton is once again changing his spots.

In a sudden burst of pre-summit cordiality, President Reagan yesterday applauded progress by Soviet Leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on human rights and cheered him on to further advances. Reagan told an audience of Chicago-area business and civic leaders the United States was "heartened" by strides Gorbachev has made in emigration policies, and by his expansion of religious and political freedoms. The president acknowledged that the "changes are limited" and do not yet meet the basic standards set by the 1975 Helsinki Accords on human rights to which the Soviet Union agreed.

Amnesty International called yesterday for worldwide condemnation of human rights abuses in Iran, saying that torture and amputation were routine and that at least 1,000 political prisoners had been executed in the last six months. The London-based human rights organization, in a statement submitted to the 45th session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, expressed alarm at a new wave of executions by the Islamic fundamentalist government and urged the international community to pressure Tehran to stop the killings.

This is in response to the Dec. 14 Op-ed Page article by Rep. Louis "Woody" Jenkins regarding the treatment of those held in Nicaraguan prisons. Mr. Jenkins gives a misleading representation of his "neutrality" between Nicaragua and the contras. The organization that he chairs, Friends of the Americas, does operate refugee relief programs, but its whole purpose is not humanitarian. The program it operates on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border has close ties with the Misura contra faction (which is allied with the Nicaraguan Democratic Front)

Jerome J. Shestack grew up with his parents and grandparents in an Atlantic City boardinghouse until he was 7 years old. Both his grandfathers were rabbis and, his family recalled, he spoke Hebrew and Yiddish before he began to speak English. But he was a fast learner. Mr. Shestack, 88, the Philadelphia lawyer who was president of the American Bar Association in 1997 and 1998 as well as an international human-rights leader, died of kidney failure Thursday, Aug. 18, at his home in Center City.