Office of the Historian

112. Message From British Prime Minister Thatcher to President Reagan1

London, October 20, 1988, 10:20 a.m.

Please pass following message to President Reagan from Prime Minister Thatcher.

Dear Ron,

We face a very important decision on how to deal with the Soviet proposal for a CSCE Human Rights meeting in Moscow. Our consistent pressure for an improvement in human rights in the Soviet Union is achieving results, thanks in particular to the way in which you took the argument to the heart of the Soviet system during your own visit to Moscow.2 We need to keep up our pressure: not polemically, but persistently to ensure that the improvement is sustained.

I worry that the suggestion that we should now agree to a human rights meeting in Moscow will be taken by the Soviet leadership as a sign that we think that the Russians have done enough and will be used by them for propaganda purposes. Moreover, our support and advocacy has hitherto sustained those individuals in the Soviet Union who have shown such courage in campaigning for human rights in their own country. All their hopes and faith will crumble if they think we have been hoodwinked into agreeing to a Moscow Human Rights Conference. There is still a very long way to go before the Soviet Union truly accepts that human rights are God-given and cannot be taken away by the state. A year ago, the United States Government set out the sort of human rights criteria it would expect the Soviet Union to meet.3 What I propose now is that we should aim to agree clear, specific criteria which would have to be met, and be seen to be met, if the West was to consider attending a conference in Moscow. If the two of us can do this we should be able to persuade our other allies to rally to that position. Without such clear criteria, the Soviet Union would have every opportunity to backslide on their commitments, and we who have been so true to our commitment would be thought to have forsaken it.

I am asking Geofrey Howe to be in touch sepatately with George Shultz4 about the details of the criteria we should seek to establish. I [Page 343] hope you can agree that we should work together in this way. We have come this far, we can’t falter now.5

Warm regards

Margaret
  1. Source: Reagan Library, Lisa R. Jameson Files, Moscow Human Rights Conference 10/12/1988–11/01/1988. Secret; Immediate. Printed from a copy transmitted by cable from the Cabinet Office in London to the White House.↩
  2. Reference is to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in May 1988. See Document 109.↩
  3. See footnote 4, Document 97.↩
  4. Not found.↩
  5. No response from Reagan has been found but see Document 113.↩