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The 'Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe', known as the 'Helsinki Final Act', 'Helsinki Accords' or 'Helsinki Declaration', was the final act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki, Finland in December, 1975 among the United States and Canada, the Soviet Union and the countries of Europe (including Turkey but excluding Albania and Andorra). It was signed by 35 countries.
The act's "Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States"
enumerated the following 10 points:


The document was seen both as a significant step toward reducing Cold War tensions and as a major diplomatic boost for the Soviet Union at the time, due to its clauses on the inviolability of national borders and respect for territorial integrity, which were seen to consolidate the USSR's territorial gains in Eastern Europe following the Second World War.
However, the civil rights portion of the agreement provided the basis for the work of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an independent non-governmental organization created to monitor compliance to the Helsinki Accords (which evolved into several regional committees, eventually forming the International Helsinki Federation and Human Rights Watch). While these provisions applied to all signatories, the focus of attention was on their application to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "[Leonid] Brezhnev had looked forward, [Anatoly] Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems — at least the more courageous — could claim official permission to say what they thought."

Contents

External links

External links

★ Full text of the Final Act, 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe

★ United States Helsinki Commission

★ Signing of the Final Act on August 1st 1975