Proclamation 4578—Captive Nations Week, 1978

By a joint resolution approved July 17, 1959 (73 Stat. 212), the Eighty-Sixth Congress authorized and requested the President to proclaim the third week of July in each year as Captive Nations Week.

For more than two hundred years our Nation has sustained the belief that national independence, liberty and justice are the fundamental rights of all people. Today we reaffirm our commitment to these principles. In particular, we pay tribute to those individuals and groups who demonstrate their attachment to these principles in their own country and throughout the world.

Now, Therefore, I, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate the week beginning July 16, 1978, as Captive Nations Week.

I invite the people of the United States to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies and activities and to renew their dedication to the cause of all people who seek freedom, independence, and basic human rights.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this eleventh day of July, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-eight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and third.

JIMMY CARTER