Patricia M. Derian

Patricia Murphy Derian ( Murphy; August 12, 1929 – May 20, 2016) was an American civil rights and human rights activist who opposed racism in Mississippi and went on to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981. She was, remembered The Times of London, "a courageous champion of civil rights who took on some of the world's most brutal dictators in her role as a senior American diplomat".

Biography Patricia Murphy was born on August 12, 1929, in New York City and grew up in Danville, Virginia. She was educated at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, graduating in 1952. Derian helped organize the Loyalist Democrats (not to be confused with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party) as a challenge to the state's all-white official delegation

In 1978, Derian married Hodding Carter III, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.

Derian was a vocal critic of Jeane Kirkpatrick and of the so-called Kirkpatrick Doctrine during the 1980s, which advocated U.S. support of anticommunist governments around the world, including authoritarian dictatorships, if they went along with Washington's aims —believing they could be led into democracy by example. Kirkpatrick wrote, "Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies." Derian objected to Kirkpatrick's characterization of some governments as only "moderately repressive", arguing that this line of thinking allowed the U.S. to support "a little bit of torture" or "moderate" prison sentences for political dissenters. Derian ceaselessly pointed out that, when it comes to human rights, in terms of morality, credibility and effectiveness, "you always have to play it straight."

Amongst those Derian believed the United States should not support was the Shah of Iran arguing in the lead up to the Iranian Revolution that the US should not be offering any assistance to the Shah "regardless of what cause those opponents might serve".

Derian, who had headed an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights delegation in 1979 to investigate reports of widespread human rights abuses in Argentina, returned to Buenos Aires in 1985 to testify in the historic Trial of the Juntas. She was quoted in documents in the National Security Archive openly accusing military leaders of torture of prisoners at a meeting in Argentina in 1977. An Argentinian journalist, Jacobo Timerman, who was tortured by the junta, credited Derian with saving him from execution.

As the principal source of an October 1987 exposé published in The Nation, Derian revealed that in June 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had secretly given a "green light" of approval to Argentina's new far-right military rulers for state terrorist policies against a purposely overblown left-wing guerrilla threat. "It sickened me", said Derian upon revealing that in 1977, then-U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill reported to her Kissinger's real role, "that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death on the basis of a cheap whim. As time went on I saw Kissinger's footprints in a lot of countries. It was the repression of a democratic ideal."

She died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on May 20, 2016, aged 87, from Alzheimer's disease.

Publications Human Rights: A World Perspective (1978) Human Rights: The Role of Law and Lawyers: March 16, 1978, Washington, D.C coauthored with Warren Christopher, Four Treaties on Human Rights (1979) Human Rights in Latin America (1979) Human Rights in Jeopardy (1980) Review of Human Rights in Latin America (1980) Human Rights in South Africa (1980) U.S. Commitment to Human Rights (1980)