Helsinki Final Act anniversary celebrated

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has celebrated the 30th anniversary of its founding principles, the so-called Helsinki Final Act, whose human rights principles have been widely credited with contributing to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90. Thirty years ago, US president Gerald Ford, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East Germany's leader Erich Honecker, among others, signed the Final Act, which proclaimed the inviolability of frontiers in Europe, a ban on the use or threat of force and non-intervention in internal affairs. The president of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar M. Bronfman, said in a press statement: "This historic pact between the Western alliance and the Communist bloc was largely motivated by the international movement to free Soviet Jewry, and Helsinki in turn empowered the dissidents and put the Soviet Union before the court of world opinion. For the first time, principles of human rights were given teeth, beyond abstract declarations and resolutions."