The human rights brand

A TV COMMERCIAL honoring heroes and heroines of the struggle for human rights has been showing on European TV. Produced by the automaker Fiat, the ad pays respect to the ideal of universal human rights. This is commendable, as is the ad's salute to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has been incarcerated by the dictatorship in Burma for 13 of the past 18 years.

But at the same time, there is an element of exploitation in Fiat's attempt to appropriate for a luxury car some of the moral prestige that Suu Kyi and her fellow Nobel laureates have earned outside the marketplace.

The 30-second public service announcement, described as a "movie" by a voice-over narrative, shows three former Nobel Peace Prize winners arriving in sleek black Fiat Lancia Delta cars last month for the Ninth World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Paris. We see Mikhail Gorbachev reflected in the window as Poland's Lech Walesa arrives, followed by F.W. de Klerk of South Africa and Ingrid Betancourt, who is not a Nobel winner but was held hostage for six years by guerrillas in Colombia.

Finally, a last Lancia pulls up with an empty seat, symbolizing Suu Kyi's absence from the summit. "Lancia supports Aung San Suu Kyi. Free her now," the text exhorts.

The symbol is fitting. She is the only peace prize winner under lock and key. She is also the leader of a democracy movement that won Burma's last free elections in 1990 but suffers under one of the world's most vicious regimes. And the sad truth is that the Fiat ad, despite its commercial subtext, may have done more good for Suu Kyi and the people of Burma than the United Nations.