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CONFIDENTIAL Foreign and Commonwealth Office London SW1A 2AH ' 21 February 1977 cc. A. y Uganda: Human Rights Since your letter of 11 February*about President Amin, there has, as you know, been considerable public outrage at the death of Archbishop Luwum and two senior Government Ministers and an Early Day Motion has been put down in the House, calling on HMG to urge the United Nations to undertake a full inquiry into these deaths. Uganda is in fact already on the agenda of the meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights which is currently meeting in Geneva and we have instructed our Mission to support a call for an investigation into the human rights situation in that country. It is however possible that the Ugandans may, as they have done on previous occasions, wriggle out of a substantive discussion, and Dr Owen feels that we should be prepared if necessary to speak out at Geneva to prevent this happening and to make public our position. In do doing we should be acting in a manner consistent with our declared policy on human rights and should be going some way towards meeting public opinion over the most recent outrages. We could make public our position(either at Prime Ministeife Questions on Thursday or through the Lord President in response to probable questioning on the Early Day Motion). We do not yet know when exactly open discussion of Uganda will be taking place in Geneva. There is however a closed session tomorrow, 22 February^in which our Mission will need to be in a position to^talTe tEe^lBiJdatiy^gn^JJganda if there appears to be any danger of the Ugandans evading_open discussion later. I should therefore be grateful if youcould let me know by telephone before close of play today if you think the Prime Minister would have any objection to our taking the initiative, if necessary, within the UN Commission onHuman_Rights and to making our position on this~putJl±c; (R. N. Dales) Patrick Wright Esq., 10 Downing Street CONFIDENTIAL