Human Rights Head Asks Student Help To Free Prisoners

The New England Regional Director of Amnesty International last night attacked human rights violations in the Soviet Union.

Joshua M. Rubinstein, an affiliate of the Russian Research Center and the author of a book on Soviet dissidents, spoke to a Boylston Hall crowd of 40 students in the first major Harvard/Radcliffe Amnesty International event this fall.

Rubinstein cited dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Scheransky as victims of recent Soviet repression. Sakharov has been exiled to Gorky since January 1980 for his opposition to the USSR's violations of human rights accords.

He also stressed the importance of worldwide moral and political pressure in aiding political prisoners of Eastern and Western nations.

The year-old Harvard chapter also screened a short film, "Prisoners of Conscience," which followed the international organization's efforts in the cases of two Argentine and Soviet prisoners.

The group was founded in the early sixties to monitor the compliance of nations to the United Nations' Declaration on Human Rights, Rubinstein said.

Daniel E. Lieberman '86, co-chairman of the Harvard organization, announced plans before the discussion for a letter-writing campaign to the help political prisoners to take place next month.

The group also hopes to co-sponsor a forum with the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics on dissidents and human rights in February, he said. Center for International Affairs fellow Kim Due Jung would be a panelist is the event, he added.