PERSPECTIVE ON HUMAN RIGHTS : The Cause and Human Effect : Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian poet and activist, has become the world’s latest martyr for the environment.

He was murdered by his own government for trying to secure justice for his people in the face of rapacious international oil interests. Royal Dutch Shell, in collaboration with what passes for a government in Nigeria, has sucked the oil from beneath Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoniland, leaving behind death, disease, poverty and destruction. Saro-Wiwa urged his countrymen to organize and resist. His government arrested him and eight others on trumped-up charges and executed all nine over the objections of much of the world.

Saro-Wiwa joins the fallen Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes, also killed for his environmental activism, and others around the world. Concerns for preservation of human rights and environmental quality have never coincided so clearly, so tragically.

Partly owing to the increase in violence against those who would protect human health and the environment from callous companies and governments, the U.N. Human Rights Commission is debating proposals that could make such tragedies less likely to occur in the future.

Despite its avowed support of human rights and environmental protection, the Clinton administration is curiously quiet, even obstructionist, on the subject. That should change.

At issue is whether the U.N. should establish a mechanism for addressing the impacts of environmental destruction on human rights: a method for analyzing--then avoiding or mitigating before it’s too late--devastation from a proposed dam or highway or forest clear-cut or oil-extraction scheme.

Various U.N. commissions have studied the matter for more than five years. Their conclusion: A safe, healthful, secure environment is already protected as a basic human right through scores of treaties, conventions and other documents, both national and international.

Now we need mechanisms to enforce those protections. Against all reason, the U.S. is blocking efforts to establish such mechanisms.

The connection between human rights and environmental quality is inescapable.

Consider Bhopal, India, where a Union Carbide pesticide plant exploded in 1984, killing 2,000 people and maiming thousands more. Not only was the environment horrendously contaminated by the accident, the legally protected human rights to life and health were violated in the most brutal way imaginable.

Consider the proposed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, where the government plans to flood Asia’s Grand Canyon and drown the homes of 1.2 million people.

Consider Mururoa in the South Pacific, where the French have resumed nuclear testing despite vociferous worldwide protests. The radioactivity escaping into the atmosphere and the ocean from the blasts violates human rights by poisoning the environment. Simple as that.

Indeed, those who argue that protection of the environment means less protection for people (a frightening majority of Congress holds that view) have it backward. You can’t have well-protected human rights without strong environmental protections; you won’t have a sustainable environment without strong protections for human rights.

It seems pretty elementary. One reason the U.N. undertook its investigation of the linkage between human rights and the environment is that human rights law is more developed than international environmental law in this crucial respect: International human rights bodies have established procedures by which individuals can lodge complaints, even against their own governments. No parallel structure exists in any international environmental organization. And the organizations empowered to hear violations of human rights also have powers--limited though they may be--to demand relief from the government violating human rights.

It is a mystery why the Clinton administration--with its public support of human rights and the environment--is balking at this logical step in the development of international protection for human rights and the environment. Inertia plays a part, certainly. The positions taken by current U.S. representatives at the U.N. Human Rights Commission are indistinguishable from the positions of the representatives sent by the Reagan and Bush administrations. It seems likely that the Clinton administration simply hasn’t paid attention.

Opponents of the effort to boost this cause are very few. If the U.S., which tends to lead by example, changed course, the proposals would sail forward. If the administration gives this matter the consideration it deserves, it will have done the right thing.

The U.S. should lead actions against threats to human rights from environmental sources.