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In December, Derian's bureau recommended that the U.S. vote against three Inter-American Development Bank loans for Argentina and one for Chile as "signals" of U.S. disapproval of human rights violations there. None of those loans contained what Derian calls "the needy-people provision," which would justify aid to a repressive regime. In all these cases, Derian's recommendations were accepted by a permanent interagency committee, chaired by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, 52, which coordinates human rights policy throughout the Government.
Sometimes Derian is overruled. She recently lost a battle with the State Department's East Asia bureau over military aid to the Philippines. Derian and others in the Government argued that President Ferdinand Marcos' authoritarian rule necessitated substantial cuts in U.S. arms aid. The East Asia bureau countered that current negotiations with Marcos over the status of U.S. military bases in the Philippines made this the wrong year to try to force him to mend his ways. Christopher and Vance agreed.
"If we decide to go ahead with military assistance even though there are human rights abuses," explains Christopher, "we should make it clear to the country involved that we are concerned about the abuses but we're going ahead for other compelling reasons." That is the message U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines David Newsom has been reiterating to Marcos in a series of private meetings in Manila. Says Congressman Fraser, chairman of a House subcommittee that is reviewing human rights among U.S. aid recipients: "I think the Administration should be doing more about human rights in the Philippines. We shouldn't let ourselves be held hostage on the bases there." Indeed, Congress is, if anything, more militant than the Executive Branch in favoring use of U.S. influence to promote human rights.
TIME correspondents in three areas of the undeveloped world have conducted their own surveys of how the Carter human rights policy has influenced conditions in their regions:
Asia: U.S. pressure played a part in Indonesian President Suharto's recent decision to release 10,000 political prisoners. During Derian's visit to Jakarta in January, Suharto argued that security and stability still come first, but he agreed "possibly to accelerate" the release of the approximately 20,000 leftists still in custody. In South Korea, U.S. intervention,"mostly in the form of quiet diplomacy, led to the release on New Year's Eve of five prominent religious and political dissidents.