First person.

• Author: Mazilu, Dumitru
• Position: Human rights violations in Romania during Pres. Nicolae Ceausescu's reign

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19

In March 1984, I was elected a member of the United Nations Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the main subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights. The Subcommission subsequently elected me as Special Rapporteur and asked me to prepare a report on human rights and youth, to be submitted at the thirty-ninth session of the Subcommission. However, when I included in my report information on violations of human rights in my own country, the Ceausescu Government sent a letter to the United Nations, in which it stated that, in May 1987, I had suffered a heart attack and had fallen seriously ill.

In fact, I had been put in detention. Under dramatic circumstances, I wrote to the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Human Rights that I had been hospitalized twice and forced as of 1 December 1987 to retire from various governmental posts, and that despite strong pressure on me and my family, I would not comply with the Government's request that I decline voluntarily to submit the report. I also informed the Under-Secretary-General that the Romanian authorities were refusing to grant me a permit to travel to Geneva.

On 1 September 1988, the Subcommission requested the Secretary-General to make one more approach to Romania, invoking the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, adopted on 13 February 1946, and asking for the Government's cooperation. The Romanian Government responded in a 6 January 1989 aide-memoire asserting that I had been examined "in accordance with Romanian law... by a panel of doctors which decided to place me on the retired list". The Government also denied that the Convention was applicable to my case and maintained that it "does not equate rapporteurs, whose activities are only occasional, with experts on missions for the United Nations".

In the meantime, I finished my report and-under very risky circumstances-sent it on to United Nations officials. It was published in all UN...