Declaration, no final action was taken in 1973, and Resolution 3069 (XXVIII) again invited government comments and returned the matter to the Commission with a request that "a single draft Declaration" be submitted to the Economic and Social Council in 1974. Despite this wishful thinking, only the present title and preamble of the Declaration had been adopted prior to the 1979 session of the Commission. Each autumn the General Assembly adopted a procedural resolution urging the Commission to complete the Declaration, and each ensuing winter the Commission's working group was able to make only slight headway, due primarily, but not exclusively, to the dilatory tactics of Soviet bloc representatives.

As an open-ended working group of the Commission, all Member States of the UN were entitled to participate, whether holding membership or observer status in the Commission, and nongovernmental organizations were also able to join in the deliberations.

Like General Assembly and Commission working

groups on other draft instruments, the working group on the Declaration operated on a consensus basis, so that a few delegations were able to prevent adoption of substantive

provisions. Needless to say, the United States strongly favors the consensus approach in such drafting exercises, but this approach is particularly vulnerable to abuses in the form of pure filibustering or obstructionism. In the case of the draft instruments on religious intolerance, these abuses had

effectively blocked progress since 1962, and the patience of Western proponents of the initiative had finally run out by 1979. An additional complication should be mentioned here, namely the very limited participation of Third World or nonaligned delegations in the Commission working group due to the perception that the Declaration was, or at least had become, merely another East-West issue. This perception discouraged involvement by delegations outside both the Western group and the Soviet bloc, thus reducing pressure on the latter to exhibit any spirit of compromise.

During the 1979 session of the Commission, however,

First, more

several developments occurred in connection with the Declaration that marked the beginning of the end of the long and frustrating history of this drafting exercise. nonaligned countries began to take an active role in the working group debates, notably Senegal, Colombia and Egypt. Second, the East-West nature of the deadlock in the working group diminished, particularly as Islamic States entered the discussions.

Article 1 of the Declaration accords everyone the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, but Soviet bloc representatives would not accept this language without an express reference to the right to hold atheistic beliefs and to criticize religions. Their argument was based on the fact that the title of the draft Declaration had evolved to cover both "religion or belief", and that

intolerance directed against non-believers was a continuing problem in some parts of the world. The United States and other Western nations fully agreed that the term "belief" in the Declaration included atheism but maintained that it would be inappropriate to specify only one belief (or non-belief) such as atheism, since no specific religion was going to be identified in the Declaration. In our view, the phrase "freedom of thought, conscience and religion" was broad enough to encompass Soviet bloc concerns.

Much to the dismay of our Soviet colleagues, however, Islamic delegates adopted a more extreme position and emphatically rejected any explicit references to the right to criticize religious beliefs, the right to hold atheistic beliefs, and the right to change religions. These delegates indicated that no Islamic country would ever accept a Declaration that expressly incorporated such concepts, although they might be implied in more general formulations. Initially, Soviet representatives may have welcomed this development as providing a guaranteed means of deadlocking the negotiations forever, but any such thoughts soon appeared to give way to noticeable discomfort on their part in finding themselves in a direct confrontation with all participating Islamic delegations. The third favorable development in 1979 was the growing awareness in the Commission generally that the Soviets were not merely advancing strongly-held positions of principle but were

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blatantly filibustering.

This was demonstrated most

dramatically in the debate over what is now Article 3 of the Declaration. In particular, the Soviets objected to the irrefutable statement in Article 3 that discrimination between human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes a disavowal of the principles of the UN Charter and a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated in detail in the International Covenant on Human Rights.

Notwithstanding these encouraging trends, the Eastern bloc remained intransigent, and the 1979 working group was unable to adopt any substantive articles because of the aforementioned consensus approach to its work. Having concluded that seventeen years of stalemate would stretch into several decades unless decisive action were taken, Canada, in close consultation with the United States and other Western

countries, attempted to avoid the consensus obstacle by tabling a draft resolution in the Commission which noted the inability of the working group to reach consensus on draft articles, decided to adopt the first three articles of the Declaration on the basis of the "far-reaching agreement" in the working group, and also decided to allot more time to the working group during the 1980 session so that it could complete its task. After a series of Soviet procedural maneuvers failed, Resolution 20 (XXXV) was adopted by

a vote of 19 to 0, with 13 abstentions (including the USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Syria and Brazil).

Some of those abstaining, such as Brazil, did so only as a matter of principle to protest the departure from a consensus approach. As noted above, the United States strongly believes that UN drafting exercises should proceed only on a consensus basis except in extraordinary circumstances. seventeen years, the struggle for a religious intolerance declaration easily met the requirements for an exception to the general rule.

After

With regard to the Canadian initiative in 1979, much credit should be given to Ambassador Yvon Beaulne of Canada, the chairman of the Commission in 1979 and Canada's ambassador to the Holy See. He was later an active and important

participant in the 1980 and 1981 working groups. In themselves, the first three articles were not radically new. Article 1 is taken from Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 2(1) draws on Article 2 of the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Article 2(2) is derived from language in Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and Article 3 is largely borrowed from Article 1 of the Racial Discrimination

Declaration.

However, adoption at long last of the

Declaration's first substantive articles, even by voting, was a