Eliot Stellar

First, let me give my thanks for the support and assistance that the Committee on Human Rights has received from the academy membership and foreign associates, particularly our correspondents, and from the Institute of Medicine, the Academy of Engineering, members of Congress and their staff, the Department of State, and other human rights groups and organizations here in the United States and around the world. Without their help, we could not have achieved what we have in our work.

Second, let me say that in spite of the sad issues we must deal with, this symposium is a celebration. It is a celebration of the release, over the years, of scientific colleagues like Kamoji Wachiira, a geographer in Kenya; Sion Assidon, a mathematician in Morocco; Juan José Hurtado Vega, a physician in Guatemala; Enrique Ladislao Hernández Méndez, an economist in Cuba; I. Made Sutayasa, an archeologist in Indonesia; Rudolf Battek, a sociologist in Czechoslovakia; Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a mathematician in Poland; Husain al Shahristani, a physicist in Iraq; and of course, our foreign associate Andrei Sakharov.

This symposium is also a celebration of marked improvements in human rights situations in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, the Philippines, and Haiti. In the Soviet Union in recent months, under the policy of glasnost, we have seen the release of many of the committee's prisoners, including Iosif Begun, Iosif Berenshtein, Anatoly Koryagin, Ivan Kovalev, Vladimir Lifshits, and Tatyana Osipova.

Finally, this symposium is a celebration of the presence here today of three of the committee's former prisoners of conscience: Juan Luís González of Chile, Ismail Mohamed of South Africa, and Yuri Orlov of the Soviet Union.

While we have much to celebrate, we must, nevertheless, remember that severe violations of human rights still continue in many areas of the world. Our committee considers that one of its responsibilities is to increase awareness of these violations and encourage actions to end them. This we are here to do today—not as experts, but as scientists dedicated to human rights issues.

Given our limited time, we have tried to narrow our focus to three topics of particular interest to the members of the academy.

Each will be introduced by one of our committee members. Gerard Debreu, professor of economics and mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley and the 1983 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, will introduce the first topic on torture, psychiatric abuse, and the ethics of medicine.

Gilbert White, Gustavson Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado and a foreign member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, will introduce the second topic on human rights, human needs, and scientific freedom.

Francis Low, institute professor in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will introduce the third topic on human rights and human survival.

Let us begin. Dr. Debreu.