|
Abstract
The Helsinki Accords resonated with dissident
movements in the Soviet Bloc that had reconstructed a classical
liberal approach to human rights. Human rights campaigns on both
sides of the Iron Curtain emphasized civil and political rights. But
human rights revisionism, expanding the scope of human rights, was
growing in international institutions. In 1993, the international
community embraced the concept of the ‘indivisibility’ of human
rights. An expansive, ‘post-modern’ vision of human rights
de-emphasized the protection of basic individual freedoms, while
expanding global regulation. A strong moral and political challenge
to classical human rights has emerged in the form of Eurasianism, a
statist doctrine that denies the existence of universal human rights
and insists that each culture has its own values. The idea of human
rights as protections for basic freedoms, diluted and weakened over
decades by assaults and compromises, may lack the moral clarity
needed to confront the Eurasian challenge.
Introduction
Human rights protections have been a cornerstone
of the political commitments shared by the participating States of
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE –
before 1994 the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe)
since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. Principle VII
called for ‘respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,
including the freedom of choice, religion, or belief’. The Final Act
referred to both civil and political rights, and economic and social
rights: the participating States would ‘promote and encourage the
effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural
and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent
dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full
development’. But the dynamic element in the Helsinki Accords – what
aroused hopes and actions in civil society – has always been
classical human rights, the ‘negative liberties’ that compelled
governments to respect fundamental individual rights and freedoms.
The Helsinki Accords committed the participating States to ‘confirm
the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and
duties’. They thus implied that those fundamental freedoms needed to
be honoured if respect for other rights was to be realized; that is,
they established a priority for basic freedoms as opposed to welfare
rights. During the Cold War, liberal democracies tended to focus on
civil and political rights, while communist states claimed priority
for economic and social rights, whose legitimacy within the
international system had been assured by their inclusion in the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Key human rights concepts
promoted mainly by the Soviet Bloc and Third World countries,
including the ‘indivisibility of human rights’ and the ‘right to
development’, gained ground. But the civil society human rights
communities on both sides of the Iron Curtain tended to emphasize
civil and political rights. Activists in the Soviet Bloc held
diverse and often inchoate views on the philosophy of human rights,
but rediscovered the fundamental precepts of classical liberalism in
their principled confrontation with totalitarian regimes. Focusing
on civil liberties, they framed human rights work as a scientific
activity based on objective standards and facts, primarily aimed at
holding states accountable for protecting individual freedoms.
With the end of the Cold War, the international
community more strongly embraced elements of the Soviet concept of
human rights – a much broader human rights agenda than that
suggested by the Helsinki Final Act. The 1993 Vienna World
Conference on Human Rights resulted in consensus – essentially a
political compromise – on balancing the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’
versions of human rights, attempting to resolve contradictions
between the social and economic rights propounded by socialist
states and the individual liberties favoured in the West. While the
post–Cold War Helsinki human rights community has generally focused
on individual civil and political rights, the global human rights
movement has moved towards collective, social and economic rights,
embracing an expansive vision of freedom as dependent on positive
state actions, not simply state restraint. There has also been a
trend towards restricting fundamental freedoms in deference to the
goals of tolerance and community values.
Today, the Helsinki human rights principles of
individual intellectual and political freedom face a renewed
challenge in the form of the ‘Eurasian’ doctrine, articulated mainly
by Russian political philosopher Alexandr Dugin and founded largely
on teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. Eurasianism challenges
the very idea of universal human rights, promoting instead the
notion that particular societies and nations have their own human
rights values, a position often taken by many authoritarian states
over the past decades, including those in Central Asia. Freedom is
seen not as the possibility for individual initiative and a posture
of critical independence from the state, but rather in an embrace of
national authority, identity and purpose. On the global scene, more
and more governments are adopting a similar approach, driving a
movement that not only opposes economic neoliberalism but promotes a
human rights concept based on providing security via positive state
actions, while de-emphasizing individual freedoms by balancing them
against other objectives.
Human rights and ideology during the Cold
War
Dissident human rights concepts
During the Cold War, and to an extent inspired by
the Helsinki Final Act, a unique and original human rights discourse
emerged from Soviet and East European dissent and has shaped the
approach of the global civil society human rights community. The
human rights doctrines of the Soviet-era dissident human rights
movement, as a subset of a diffuse, highly diverse field of
dissenting groups and individuals, cannot easily be described, and
even its still-living members exhibit a certain habitual opacity.
The lines between ‘human rights’ movements and a wider range of
initiatives composed of people seeking reform, autonomy, or the
downfall of the Soviet system have never been clear. Some dissidents
had no concern for human rights and held views antithetical to human
rights. The dissident human rights movement, in general, consisted
of those who worked for the realization of the rights and freedoms
of others from an inclusive and non-ideological perspective,
referring to national and international law and political agreements
as standards defining state obligations.
Soviet dissidents reinvented human rights for
themselves, according to Ludmilla Alexeyeva (1985, 267ff.), a
historian and founder and current chief of the Moscow Helsinki
Group, who has been among the Soviet human rights movement’s primary
‘participant-observers’. Dissenting human rights activists had
limited or no access to the philosophical and legal literature that
informs the human rights tradition. Especially in the early years of
the movement, they also had little or no contact with civil society
human rights formations in the West. They did not take over existing
interpretations of the concept of human rights, but constructed the
meaning of human rights for themselves in the face of antithetical
conditions in which basic liberties were denied, and in relative
isolation. Their posture has been characterized as one of ‘moral
idealism’ (Barghoorn 1966, 47). The members of the Soviet human
rights movement tended to promote human rights for its own sake. An
analyst writing during the Cold War noted: ‘Dissent in Soviet
society has an existential stance: the inner need of the individual
to speak or act in the name of ideals, even when no concrete means
exist to realize them [as a] moral compulsion’ (Kadarkay 1982,
168ff.).
In this regard, their stance was consistent with
the idea of the need for moral constraints on civil law, and the
nature of freedom, originating in classical Greek philosophy. The
Stoic philosophers had distinguished between natural law and civil
law; civil law, the laws promulgated by states and legislatures,
needed to be consistent with the moral requirements of human nature.
The law needed to respect the sanctity of the individual. In the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle took freedom to mean primarily the
ability to make choices, the quality that distinguishes humans from
animals, which is thus a pillar of and essential to the fulfilment
of human nature. Martin Palous, a philosopher and a leader in the
Czechoslovak human rights movement Charter 77, considered that
freedom in its ‘positive, classical sense’ exists in ‘public acts
based on initiative’ (Tucker 2000, 120–121). In the classical
liberal view of human rights formed by Immanuel Kant and John Locke,
freedom is an end in itself, a key to the fulfilment of human
potential in the exercise of reason, free will and moral agency.
Freedom, in turn, does not exist unless it is exercised and allowed
to be exercised. Kant said that freedom is what bestows dignity on a
person – if human rights are to protect dignity, they must first and
foremost guarantee freedom. In classical human rights doctrine,
protecting freedom is a moral duty.
In a publication that followed his exile in the
US, Soviet human rights advocate Valery Chalidze (1984, 3) wrote
that the dissidents’ struggle for freedom was ‘limited to advancing
freedom of speech, recognition of the rule of law, and due process’.
‘Freedom means accepting responsibility for one’s own behavior and
future’ and ‘the need to free oneself from the belief in the
possibility of a perfect social system’ (Chalidze 1975, 4). For
intellectuals like Chalidze, freedom meant not only the exercise of
reason and choice in the face of an oppressive, controlling state,
but also freedom from natural desires that impinge on intellectual
and moral integrity.
The dissident human rights movement reconstructed
classical human rights principles also with regard to the ‘utility’
of human rights. In defending freedom, human rights activity was
thus not a means to other ends, but an end in itself. Human rights
work was not conceived as a ‘practical’ or ‘realist’ activity,
associated with clear ‘objectives’ and ‘results’. It was also
generally clear that the human right to freedom was a universal
individual right – clear because Marxist-Leninist doctrine, while
incorporating the word ‘freedom’ for manipulative political
purposes, qualified its meaning with denunciations of ‘arbitrary’
individual wishes, and the obligation to conform to the interests of
the majority.
The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group, one of
the first to follow the Moscow Helsinki Group’s lead, concerned
itself largely with preserving the national and cultural traditions
of Ukraine, but it also stressed individual rights. ‘A Manifesto of
the Ukrainian Human Rights Movement’, from 1977, in a rare explicit
reference to classical human rights doctrine, claimed that ‘the
state does not bestow a right on a citizen, but only defends a
person’s natural right’. The law ‘should provide for the primacy of
the individual’ and be ‘the guarantor of the freedom and sovereignty
of the individual’ (Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group 1977,
93ff.). In a manner typical of numerous national human rights
movements, therefore, Ukrainian activists saw no contradiction
between the idea of individual rights and a primary concern for
preserving Ukrainian national identity.
Political diversity was a principle of both the
Charter 77 movement in communist Czechoslovakia and the Soviet
dissenting human rights groups. This inclusiveness was, in effect, a
laboratory for the viability of human rights as a unifying
principle. To enjoy human rights meant that one’s freedom to think,
reason and judge was honoured, but in a sense human rights was
‘empty’ of particular visions of what a society must do to be good.
Dissident Soviet human rights activists defended the rights of all,
including varieties of Marxists and Czarists who themselves did not
believe in civil liberties, and members of ethnic-national movements
whose concern was only for members of their own group, not respect
for individual rights as such. Human rights defenders also defended
Slavophile, anti-rationalist and anti-Western extremists; in doing
so, they separated questions of ideological politics from human
rights, recognizing that all are entitled to basic freedoms.
When we examine the intellectual character of the
dissident human rights movement, its scientific approach emerges as
a key element. Andrey Sakharov, Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Yuri Orlov,
as well as figures like Václav Havel, among others, approached human
rights as intellectuals, and in numerous cases as trained physical
or social scientists, and while they were clearly motivated by moral
principles, they approached the question of human rights largely
detached from political passions. A dissident intellectual was one
who strived to live where one could search for truth, as opposed to
an environment of ‘ritualistic ideological automatism’ (Tucker 2000,
116). To do so was morally necessary to defend individual human
rights. The Chronicle of Human Events, a primary samizdat or
self-published underground newsletter initiated in 1968, had a
scientific, factual, dispassionate style. Human rights was seen as a
moral and intellectual discipline of self-depoliticization. For the
human rights dissident, this was an ‘authentic life’, a free life
‘in truth’, as opposed to one in which thoughts and actions are
understood as expressions of an all-determining collective identity
(Tucker 2000, 173).
The scientific approach of the dissident human
rights movement was given new impetus by the Helsinki Accords. The
contradiction between these political commitments and the reality of
existence in Eastern Bloc states, where those human rights were not
respected in any way, was stark. Human rights analysis thus required
objectively measuring the behaviour of a state against the
principles and standards to which a government had committed itself
by signing the Helsinki Final Act. The effectiveness of human rights
activity rested on objectivity; bias stemming from either support of
or opposition to the state would distort and discredit results.
The Soviet Initiative Group for Human Rights, the
Moscow Helsinki Group, and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia saw their
mandates as assisting the state to abide by the Helsinki Final Act,
and they also sought dialogue on their findings and concerns with
the communist authorities. Closely associated with the scientific
ethos of politically neutral and independent civil society human
rights activity was the principle of ‘legalism’, a view of law as an
objective framework imposing obligations not only on citizens but
also on the state. The formation of these human rights concepts was
– again – a matter of negating the Soviet legal perspective that
Chalidze (1975, 4) described as the ‘subordination of law to
ideology’. As such, they emerged as an indigenous form of procedural
liberalism.
This brings us finally to the issue of
non-partisanship, the political stance of most dissident human
rights defenders, which has been suggested by a number of the
preceding points. The insistence on a firm distinction between human
rights activity and political activity was a common refrain, and one
that has, in varying degrees, been embraced, yet often betrayed, by
the post–Cold War international human rights movement. The main
currents of Soviet human rights activity did not seek ‘regime
change’, or even any specific political outcome, but rather, as
indicated above, a respect for individual rights and freedoms, as
protected by law. Charter 77, for example, was explicitly not a base
for oppositional political activity, and had no programme of
political reform or distinctive political agenda; its main
philosophical proponent, Jan Patočka, considered the movement an
‘apolitical act’ (Tucker 2000, 120). Leaders like Sakharov
demonstrated their political neutrality, for example by
demonstrating not only against Soviet violations of human rights but
also against American policies like the war in Vietnam. Yuri Orlov,
a practicing physicist and founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group,
clarified in a conversation with the author in the late 1990s that
human rights should not be about ‘what’ but rather about ‘how’.
It is fair to say that most Soviet-era human
rights defenders showed little genuine interest in economic and
social rights, or rejected the concept altogether; nonetheless,
significant figures in the movement have taken such rights
seriously, and categorical assertions are unwarranted. Chalidze,
whose views are clearly liberal, wrote that civil and political
rights are universal, while economic, social and cultural rights
‘depend largely on a particular economic and social system’
(Chalidze and Schifter 1988, 28); that is, such rights should be
respected according to public choices based on democratic processes
within particular societies. Economic and social rights were part of
the realm of positive law, but not the natural law upon which human
rights were based.
But the dissident human rights community generally left such
conclusions within a strategic silence, not openly criticizing
economic and social rights but generally ignoring them. Chalidze
attributed this to ideological ‘inertia’ and to a deep sympathy with
the goals of socialism, despite the abuses of the communist state.
He wrote that although economic and social rights had been included
among those set forth in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights to ‘placate’ the Soviet Union, and reflected ‘Soviet
propaganda’ (Chalidze and Schifter 1988, 5), with a few exceptions,
they were never a target of significant invective by the Western
human rights community. Avoiding doctrinal human rights
controversies that abutted fundamental political disputes was
consistent with the effort to keep human rights advocacy and
politics separate.
The Cold War human rights debate
The Cold War, while a period of intense military
preparedness and bloody proxy wars, was in large part an ideological
and philosophical war between Soviet communism and Western
capitalism. To an extent, the Cold War was also a conflict about the
meaning of human rights. The forces of state socialism, while losing
ground through the processes that culminated in the collapse of
communist regimes, nevertheless managed to set in motion significant
changes in the international human rights machinery based on
collectivist and redistributionist concepts.
Domestic Western activists campaigning for the
rights of people behind the Iron Curtain were generally in agreement
in their focus on civil and political rights, while social and
economic rights were largely discredited by their highly problematic
implementation in communist societies. The American human rights
organization Helsinki Watch was founded to monitor implementation of
the Helsinki Accords and to support the Moscow Helsinki Group,
Charter 77 and other similar organizations behind the Iron Curtain.
In addition, the Soviet and Western human rights groups, including
Amnesty International, shared not only a primary interest in civil
and political rights, but also a rigorous non-partisanship.
At the United Nations, a vivid political
confrontation of the differences between the two categories of
rights had eventually led to the promulgation of two separate human
rights treaties in which the ‘mixed bag’ of principles contained in
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights were codified into
international law. The decision for separate treaties was considered
a victory for the proponents of classical human rights and for legal
scholars and jurists who argued that social and human rights could
not be adjudicated in the same manner as civil and political rights.
It was a victory for those who considered social and economic rights
‘aspirational’ but not functional, like legal, international human
rights – they were a different kind of human right – a position
typically taken by American diplomats during the Cold War and even
today, for example.
The ideological Cold War was a period of serious
and open discussion about the meaning of human rights in terms of
fundamental philosophical, legal and economic principles. An era of
‘alternative human rights’, or human rights revisionism, emerged,
challenging the narrow classical liberal interpretation. Believing
that human rights had been used as a political club against them,
the Eastern Bloc as well as Third World states in turn took up human
rights as a weapon in their conflicted dealings with Western liberal
democracies. In April and May 1968, the UN held an International
Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. The Tehran conference had
serious consequences for the concept of human rights: an ‘expansion
of human rights to cover nearly every concern of the Global South’
(Whelan 2010, 144). While neither its Proclamation nor its Final Act
addressed the problem of protecting freedoms, they strongly promoted
placing economic, social and cultural rights, and the ‘right to
development’, at the centre of the UN human rights agenda. At the
conference, the Iranian delegation insisted that ‘the promotion of
human rights was directly related to economic and social progress’
(quoted in Whelan 2010, 146). Similar language appeared in the
conference’s Final Act, which asserted, in Article 17, ‘a profound
inter-connection between the realization of human rights and
economic development’.
Perhaps most significantly, the Tehran
International Conference on Human Rights revealed how the concept of
the ‘indivisibility’ of freedom rights and economic and social
rights would emerge as a lever to encourage international transfers
for ‘development’, as well as one that would be a tactical tool for
contextualizing and reducing criticism of violations of freedoms.
The Final Proclamation of the conference stated: ‘Since human rights
and fundamental freedoms are indivisible, the full realization of
civil and political rights without the enjoyment of economic, social
and cultural rights is impossible’ (Whelan 2010).
In 1977, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution
32/130, ‘Alternative Approaches and Ways and Means within the UN for
Improving the Effective Enjoyment of Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms’. The resolution endorsed the Tehran position on the
relationship between the different kinds of human rights, repeating
that ‘the full realization of civil and political rights without the
enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights is impossible’.
Indeed, driving the concept of human rights further into the realm
of economic policy, it called for a ‘new international economic
order’. According to legal scholar Moses Moskowitz (1979, 122), the
resolution passed with ‘patently ideological and political support’.
Another critic said the resolution made it possible ‘for any
developing country to defend itself against charges of human rights
violations by replying that it hadn’t received adequate foreign aid’
(Adams 1984, 119) – the argument being that granting civil and
political rights without the financial means to provide social and
economic rights would only lead to political conflict and
instability.
Democratic states did not vote against Resolution
32/130 but merely abstained. It passed with the support of 123
states, none voting against, a sign of reluctance to defend a
concept of human rights centred on fundamental freedoms. In fact,
Western powers, seeking to avoid any impression of insouciance about
the poverty that has plagued citizens of Third World countries, have
rarely openly criticized the concept of economic and social rights
or the notion of the indivisibility of human rights. Many signed the
International Convention on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights,
including the US under President Jimmy Carter (although the US has
yet to ratify it).
The most notable criticism of conceptual changes
in human rights occurring in the UN system came from the US during
the administration of President Ronald Reagan, a period of intense
confrontation with the USSR. American officials then forthrightly
denied the legitimacy of economic and social rights, and the US
government denounced regimes that tried to obfuscate restrictions on
liberty with claims about honouring those rights. Reagan’s
officials, who also forcefully defended Soviet human rights
dissidents, even considered dropping the term ‘human rights’
altogether and replacing it with terms like ‘individual rights’,
‘political rights’ and ‘civil liberties’ (Lord 1984, 132), motivated
by frustration with the growing ambiguity and exploitation of the
term, which often included criticism of social and economic problems
in the US. Debate over the nature of human rights was vivid and
alive, as the limited focus on freedom rights based on natural law,
that is, the basic approach to human rights represented by the
Helsinki Accords, came under more intense pressure.
The post–Cold War, ‘post-modern’ UN human
rights agenda
In 2005, speaking at a conference to commemorate
the 1985 Alternative Cultural Forum in Budapest, János Kis (2006,
60), a prominent Hungarian political scientist and philosopher, said
that while the dissident human rights movement ‘took the side of
human rights universalism, they took it unreflectively, without
being challenged to defend their position against relativistic
objections’. The ‘anti-communist human rights movements’ had ‘failed
to leave after them any tools to deal with [post-communism’s]
ideological complexities’.
The dissident human rights movement, and indeed
the broader human rights outlook associated with the Helsinki Final
Act, had focused on what Kis termed the ‘non-controversial core of
human rights’. But what might now be seen as the simplicity or
innocence of the movement should, in fact, be an important point of
reference in the face of the politicization and fragmentation of
human rights after 1989. In his speech, Kis made reference to two
major challenges faced by the concept of human rights that had
emerged following the momentous changes that burst forth that year.
One was a ‘post-modern’ challenge to the universality of human
rights, a claim that the concept of human rights is simply a ‘local
ideology’, and ‘socially constructed’ like all others; this gave
rise to a range of ‘collectivist’ concepts, as opposed to the
principle of universal individual human rights. The other was the
claim that political action has no moral dimension, and is simply
about power; human rights is, in this view, a political ideology and
as such a strategy to gain power. For several decades following the
end of communist regimes, human rights concepts were strongly
affected by the first trend; in the present, regimes around the
world increasingly turn to an ideology of power – often justified in
the name of ‘human rights’.
In 1993, the UN organized the World Conference on
Human Rights in Vienna, a profoundly influential meeting in which
the international community put its imprimatur on a new vision of
human rights, and one that contrasted broadly with both the focus on
civil and political rights in the Helsinki Final Act, and the
principled avoidance of ideological politics that Cold War–era
dissident human rights defenders had upheld. Drawing on tendencies
that had shown themselves in the formation and content of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that had gathered strength
in the Cold War period, the UN forcefully endorsed the concept of
the indivisibility of human rights and declared that all human
rights are equal, pulling the concept of human rights towards
specific political orientations and holding it there as a fixed
dogma. The new vision tilted heavily towards economic and social
human rights; the records of the UN Committee on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights in the lead-up to the conference show that
promoting ‘indivisibility’ was a tactic to promote those rights
(Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights 1993). In linking
and balancing freedoms and services, it could be compatible with
authoritarian regimes that aimed for a concept of human rights
without individual civil and political freedom at its core.
This may be understood as a ‘post-modern’ approach
to human rights because it embraced a profound scepticism of the
long-standing binary oppositions that had structured human rights
discourse since the Enlightenment: the distinction between the
rights of individuals honoured by state restraint (negative
liberties), and the material benefits to welfare made possible by
positive state actions; the distinction between the obligations of
states to protect human rights, and those of private citizens and
independent institutions. Post-modernism proceeds from an assumption
that objective truth does not exist, holding instead that truth is a
social construction; its most radical proponents, like Michel
Foucault (1991), have held that truth is produced by power. The
post-modern human rights approach is ‘anti-foundational’. It has
detached itself from the principle that universal human rights are
founded on a common and eternal human nature, turning instead
towards the ‘cultural relativist’ position that human rights can and
should evolve as societies and their values change.
When opening the Vienna conference, UN
Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Gali gave voice to this point of
view when he observed that ‘the world is undergoing a
metamorphosis, … certainties are collapsing … the lines are
becoming blurred’. He suggested that the conference would establish
links between development, economic and social rights, and civil and
political rights. Each cultural epoch, he said, has its own way of
implementing human rights, which are ‘the ultimate measure of all
politics’. He said that human rights are ‘both absolute and
historically determined’ – that they ‘should evolve simultaneous
with history’ yet would not cease to be ‘universal’ (Boutros-Gali
1993). The Secretary General’s speech can be interpreted as
signifying that the concept of human rights depends on politics, as
‘only democracy can guarantee human rights’ (Boutros-Gali 1993). The
post–Cold War, post-modern concept of human rights seemed one that
could be adapted to what situations demanded.
Since the Vienna conference, the doctrine of the
‘indivisibility, interdependence and inter-relatedness’ of human
rights has become a dogma that is commonly invoked to promote
economic and social rights, and also exploited by authoritarian
states to divert attention from denials of freedom. No human rights
violation can be considered as an objective problem in and of
itself; human rights problems can be endlessly contextualized and
relativized, balanced against a wide range of other concerns. Some,
including those who support a more equal distribution of resources,
see in the increased emphasis on economic and social rights an
undermining of the democratic processes by which societies should
form social policies (Neier 2012, 81). But the World Conference
established that poverty is a ‘violation of human dignity’ and
fighting poverty is a human rights activity to be informed by human
rights principles. Economic inequalities, a central challenge of any
society, would be adjudicated by courts, as opposed to democratic
action in legislatures. By emphasizing social and economic rights
and promoting the view that positive state actions are how to
realize them, the international community embraced and promoted the
political position that government action, rather than restraint,
was essential to realizing human rights.
The women’s rights movement emerged at Vienna to
challenge entrenched forms of gender discrimination. But it also
helped change the UN’s general approach to human rights, fuelling a
redefinition of universality and perhaps even a redefinition of the
human person – a person would, as a result, be seen largely as
defined by subcategories of humanity – by sex, age, class,
ethnicity, and so on. New treaties would need to be promulgated to
rectify historical injustices to various groups. Another innovation
resulted when women’s rights activists and diplomats branded the
perpetrators of domestic violence human rights violators. Largely as
a result, the primary responsibility of states to honour human
rights was clouded over by the concept of violations by ‘non-state
actors’, that is, civilians being held culpable for human rights
violations. The distinction between crimes and human rights
violations was blurred.
Finally, human rights also became more internally
contradictory. The 1993 conference ushered in an era in which a
number of putative human rights, chiefly protection from intolerance
and xenophobia, came into conflict with freedom of thought,
conscience and speech, thus seriously weakening respect for these
primary human rights. No one can deny that intolerance and
xenophobia are unhealthy and potentially dangerous, and that they
are often associated with human rights violations and crimes. In the
years since the 1993 conference, however, international human rights
intergovernmental machinery, governments and civil society,
including the OSCE, have poured resources into ‘combating
intolerance and xenophobia’, focusing on prejudicial attitudes among
citizens. In recent years, eradicating ‘Islamophobia’, for example,
has become a central objective, while efforts to end ‘hate speech’
are today a high priority for international human rights
institutions. Their legal foundation lies in Article 20 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states
that ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that
constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence
shall be prohibited by law.’ In negotiating this treaty during the
Cold War, Western diplomats had vigorously opposed the use of such
vague language, which they said could be misused to silence
politically dissenting voices, but the measure passed, with the
support of the Soviet Union and other repressive states (Mchangama
2011). Today, all European states have hate speech legislation. In
addition, since the early 1990s and the Vienna conference, and
especially among the most developed democracies, a strong human
rights trend has been towards restricting and imposing ‘politically
correct’ bans on forms of speech.
Since the 1993 Vienna conference, a main task of
the official UN human rights apparatus has been to promote the
notion of the indivisibility of human rights and the other elements
of the Vienna Declaration, indeed, to act as an ‘enforcer’ of the
doctrine; the issues debated during the Cold War are no longer
considered open issues. The international human rights community has
also increasingly focused on global regulation of economies. For
example, in a letter to UN delegations, the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights, Navi Pillay (2013), outlined the principles that
should animate a ‘post-2015’ human rights agenda. The principles
include ‘substantive equality of both opportunity and result under
the rule of law’. Substantive equality of result is a blatantly
political goal that depends on an ideological political programme
for its achievement, and is clearly at variance with the principle
that human rights should be politically neutral. A human rights
‘establishment’ has emerged, joined by both civil society and
governmental actors, which, following the strategic compromises of
the Vienna conference, has absorbed a number of the central human
rights doctrines promoted by the Soviet Union. To a large extent,
therefore, it can be argued that human rights has lost the dissident
movement’s charismatic association with the non-partisan struggle
for freedom, and become a slogan of indistinct meaning, one that
could be attached to an ever-widening range of demands, and even the
practices of the worst dictatorships on Earth. Human rights has lost
the clarity that gave the Helsinki Final Act its power to inspire
those seeking freedom.
Eurasianism: an anti-modern challenge to
liberal human rights doctrines
With the prevailing idea of human rights having
become diffuse and contradictory, and intellectual human rights
discourse thwarted by dogmatism promoted by UN institutions, its
deepest foundations have been challenged from within the broad OSCE
community of participating States. Eurasianism, as a political idea,
has commonly stood for a long-standing Russian vision of a blending
of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures and political values. Eurasia
has come into sharper focus in the context of reborn conflict
between Russia and the Euro-Atlantic political community following
the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian involvement in Eastern
Ukraine, events that have suggested the emergence of a ‘second Cold
War’. Recently the word has been associated with an ambitious vision
in which Russia and other former Soviet states will be ideologically
united with European societies by a common determination to govern
according to their own national traditions, excluding the
fundamental liberal democratic principles that are enshrined in the
international human rights system, and eschewing the political
values of ‘neoliberal’ Atlanticism. A number of opposition political
parties in Europe have embraced the political vision of Eurasia
(Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting Institute 2014).
Eurasia thus stands for an exceptionalism as
regards international human rights, one claimed for societies
considered part of the Russian cultural space, yet one that can be
embraced by other societies as well. It invokes familiar ‘cultural
relativism’ arguments that are also made by numerous states in other
regions in justifying rejection of universal human rights standards.
But while the Eurasian political idea and its human rights
components, largely carried by leaders of the Russian Federation and
allied states, is generally expressed in defensive postures against
criticisms of human rights practices, it is also increasingly a
positive doctrine about human rights and freedoms. Eurasianism may
be considered ‘anti-modern’, invoking the primacy of national
traditions and cultural identity and a conservative Orthodox
Christianity, as opposed to a vision of a universal obligation to
protect individual freedom and civil society based on a common human
nature, that is, the vision of human rights informed by
Enlightenment rationalism.
The Eurasian human rights vision
The Eurasian human rights doctrine has formed
itself around a harsh critique of post-modernism, and as an
antithesis to globalized human rights values; few if any references
to international legal human rights obligations may be found in
explanations of the Eurasian approach to human rights, as if they
are of no import whatsoever. Yet the Eurasian approach to human
rights is consistent with several trends inspired by principles the
international community embraced at the 1993 World Conference on
Human Rights. A primary source for the Eurasian approach to human
rights lies in initiatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2008,
the church published Basic Principles of the Russian Church Teaching
on Human Dignity, Freedom, and Rights (Russian Orthodox Church
2008). The document was developed with the assistance of Dugin, who
has emerged as the primary intellectual architect of Eurasianism and
a significant influence on President Vladimir Putin and the Russian
political and religious elite. Dugin stated that the tract was
‘designed to influence the legal model of the Russian state’
(Siskova 2008).
According to the Basic Principles, it is
legitimate for the state to limit freedom of expression, since
‘public statements and declarations should not further the
propagation of sin or generate strife and disorder in society’, thus
mixing political and religious or moral rationales for restricting
speech. Blasphemy ‘shall not be justified by the rights of the
artist, writer, or journalist’. The document states that ‘it is
especially dangerous to insult religious and national feelings, [or]
to distort information about the life of particular religious
communities, nations, social groups and personalities’. The church
thus expanded a position on insulting religion that has been
strongly promoted both by opponents of anti-Semitism and by Islamic
regimes, fusing it with and thus sacralizing ‘patriotic’ feelings.
The Basic Principles praise citizen participation in government as
long as it is supportive of the government, but ‘the use of
political and civil rights should not lead to divisions and enmity’.
The Basic Principles refer to an ‘Orthodox tradition of
conciliarity’ which ‘implies the preservation of social unity on the
basis of intransient moral values. The Church calls upon people to
restrain their egoistic desires for the sake of the common good.’
Following on this theme of unity, in a section on ‘Collective
Rights’, the document states that ‘the rights of an individual
should not be destructive for the unique way of life and traditions
of the family and for various religious, national and social
communities’. It further states:
Unity and inter-connection between civil and
political, economic and social, individual and collective human
rights can promote a harmonious order of societal life both on the
national and international level. The social value and effectiveness
of the entire human rights system depend on the extent to which it
helps to create conditions for personal growth in the God-given
dignity and relates to the responsibility of a person for his
actions before God and his neighbours.
The Basic Principles thus incorporate a notion of
the ‘indivisibility of human rights’ which, as noted above, obscures
a fundamental distinction between ‘negative liberties’ and positive
state actions and was the lynchpin of the Vienna Declaration,
suggesting and indeed encouraging a larger state role in promoting
human rights, rights conceived as dependent on conditions that can
only be provided when the state assumes an activist role, as opposed
to one of constraint. The theme of collective rights is further
extended in the Basic Principles to apply to the rights of a
‘civilization’ (à la Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’
theory) to its own values, in effect suggesting Eurasia’s cultural
relativism: ‘Civilizations should not impose their lifestyle
patterns on other civilizations.’ If one takes the Basic Principles
as a key to Russian human rights policy, they thus include a frank
rejection of the concept of universal human rights standards in
favour of a particular Russian approach, that is, a strong cultural
relativism.
Dugin, to whom we will refer in more detail below,
has stated, ‘I am deeply convinced that the conception of human
rights varies from one culture to another, from one society to
another, inasmuch as the very concept of the person varies’ (Coalson
2008). From this perspective, the Russian nation and culture is
different from others, and thus Russia naturally has its own concept
of human rights. At a news conference on 17 April 2014, President
Putin himself reportedly stated that ‘the powerful genetic code of
the Russian nation, that makes us Russians, is different from other
nations and especially compared to the so-called Western genetic
code’. Putin ominously continued by asserting that a feature of the
‘Russian genetic code’ is the ability ‘to die for the common cause
publicly, in front of the eyes of the community’ (Illarionov 2014).
These statements suggest a form of traditional
Russian ethnic or cultural nationalism. Filling an ideological void
that had existed since the end of state socialism, numerous Russian
intellectuals and political leaders have embraced the notion of
Russia as an ethnic nation, in which, according to one of the
fathers of Russian nationalism, Alexander Herzen (1812–70), ‘the
purpose of individual work was to aggrandize Russian culture’
(Greenfeld 1992, 243). Putin’s statements about the irrelevance of
nationality and his stated goal of creating a ‘single cultural
space’ have broad, worrisome implications for the protection of
minority rights in a country with 180 different ethnic groups.
Putin’s statement could be interpreted as indicating an effort ‘to
undercut nationality as such for Russians by promoting a more
expansive definition of Russianness’ (Goble 2014a).
From political to cultural control
The emergence of a distinctly Eurasian approach to
human rights in the Russian Federation is evident in changing
patterns of human rights violations. Especially since 2000, the
Russian Federation has become a ‘managed democracy’, meaning that
obstacles have been constructed to prevent profound political
change, impede conflict and encourage political loyalty. Public
opinion on political questions is strongly influenced by a dominant
state-controlled media, while only a small number of independent
media have escaped closure. Citizens’ groups and journalists who
have made independent investigations of government practices with
critical results have been met with harsh treatment, including
assassinations; and new legislation has severely restricted the
ability of nongovernmental organizations to receive and use funds
from foreign donors (the Foreign Agents Law, a term with extremely
negative connotations of dangerous espionage by hostile powers),
changes that have impacted organizations seeking to monitor human
rights. While the court system had made significant steps towards
professionalism and independence after the end of the USSR, it is
moving back towards being an instrument of the state, and is far
from able to ensure justice, particularly in politically sensitive
cases of conflict between individuals and the authorities.
Human rights violations in the Russian Federation,
particularly in the past 10 years, have evolved in the direction of
restricting freedoms, with the aim not only to secure political
hegemony but also to forge cultural, religious and spiritual harmony
and unity. Censorship has developed from a mechanism mainly aimed at
suppressing oppositional political voices to one also shielding
citizens from a range of ideas, images and texts thought to conflict
with the dominant cultural and religious values. The Internet has
come under new restrictions, with an increasing number of sites
blacklisted by the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of
Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Mass Communications
(Roskomnadzor). While the number of mass media outlets not under
tight government control had been very small for years, those
remaining few have come under more pressure, some leading to
closure. At the same time, there has been a further consolidation of
mass media in the hands of owners loyal to the government.
Legislation has been prepared to make it a crime to ‘allow
publications of false anti-Russian information’ (Moscow Times, 7
March 2014).
New bans on products are aimed at removing
influences seen as incompatible with Russian religious and moral
values. Russian politicians have recommended banning advertising for
condoms, pregnancy tests and birth control medications; on the
import of medical equipment and telephones produced abroad; and on
artistic and literary works that ‘romanticize the criminal world’
(Goble 2014b). A bill to protect children from information that
‘denies or distorts patriotism’ has been introduced, patriotism
being defined as ‘the love of the fatherland, devotion to it,
striving to serve its interests through one’s action’ (Moscow Times,
11 May 2014).
Reference can also be made to the Russian
government’s efforts to suppress public displays and support for the
rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) citizens.
Homosexuality and the obscuring of gender differences appears to be
a central concern of Eurasianism as articulated by Dugin, who has
devoted considerable analysis to what he considers an unnatural and
corrupt ‘post-modern’ tendency in Western societies to break down
clear divisions between the sexes, resulting in the phenomenon of
the ‘transhuman’ person (Dugin 2012, 191). Russian legislation has
outlawed ‘homosexual propaganda’, infringing on a number of
fundamental civil and political rights. Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan
and Kyrgyzstan are among the other states adopting or considering
similar legislation (Human Rights First 2014). In December 2014, the
Russian government named being transgender, bi-gender, asexual and
cross-dressing personality disorders that disqualify a person from
holding a driver’s license (Human Rights First 2015).
Freedom according to an ideology of state
power
As noted in the foregoing, during the Cold War,
dissident human rights defenders in the Soviet Bloc found freedom in
principled actions on behalf of victims of a totalitarian system, a
vision of freedom as moral courage and will guided by independent
rationality. Since the 1975 Helsinki Accords and into the post–Cold
War era, the international human rights system has expanded the
boundaries of human rights in the direction of positive state
obligations aimed at creating material security as a condition for
freedom. Today’s Russia-led Eurasianism poses an antithesis to
classical liberalism with a vision of freedom as cultural harmony
and as unity between the state and the individual.
During the 26th session of the UN Human Rights
Council, in June 2014, Belarusian Ambassador Mikhail Khvostov, when
confronted with a report alleging serious violations of basic
freedoms and rule of law, said that his government had been
successful at ‘organizing the political life of society’, that the
legal system is ‘secondary to politics’, and that ‘without politics
there is no purpose and without purpose there is no state’. The
state, Khvostov submitted, ‘is the guarantor of our system of values
and way of life’ (Rhodes 2014). His assertions went unchallenged by
diplomats from liberal democracies.
Eurasianism’s main challenge to the
‘uncontroversial core of human rights’ lies in its ideology of state
power. States embody cultures and traditions; states are thus not
artificial arrangements through which individuals protect their
security and guarantee their liberties according to a social
contract, as conceived in the liberal political tradition, but
rather organic entities outside of which individual life has no
purpose or meaning. The political system ‘gives us our shape’ (Dugin
2012, 169). In an echo of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger,
identity is considered to be ‘installed in us by the state’
(Malvicini 2014). According to Dugin (2012, 154), liberalism, based
on social contract theory, pluralism and the idea of civil society,
is an ‘absolute evil’, the ‘repudiation of God, tradition,
community, ethnicity, empire and kingdoms’. Liberalism is considered
to create enmity between the state and the person. It detaches the
person from the state as his or her natural spiritual home,
resulting in ‘transhumanisation’ and an ‘uncertain identity’. A
state must not be ‘neutral’ on moral questions; this would be to
neglect the sustaining values of historical communities. Dugin
asserts that the Russian conception of human rights does not include
‘the right to sin’, and that the state has an obligation to protect
itself from sinful influences (Coalson 2008).
Human rights, in this perspective, is an
alienating idea that attempts to nullify values and hierarchies that
are essential to the fulfilment of the individual in the context of
society. Human rights, with its necessary subjection of state
practices to objective scrutiny concerning compliance with abstract,
international standards, is based on and depends on a dualism
between the person and society, indeed, between the person and
her/himself. Desecrating the bond between a person and the state,
according to Eurasianism, results in a form of spiritual and
intellectual bondage, while the state, rather than being a threat to
freedom, is the source of freedom.
Eurasianism’s ideology of power thus claims to
confer a form of freedom on citizens. An analysis of censorship in
communist-ruled Hungary perhaps shows the logic of Eurasianism’s
freedom: In The Velvet Prison, Hungarian dissident Miklos Haraszti
(1988, 8) wrote: ‘Censorship professes to be freedom because it
acts, like morality, as a common spirit of both rulers and the
rules.’ Eurasianism has thus redefined freedom and human rights
consistent with its form of anti-modernism. Russian authorities, and
others, including Belarus and nearly all of the Central Asian
republics, have thus de jure or de facto rejected universal human
rights standards as something alien, imposed upon the new Eastern
Bloc by the West, but are also promoting a positive notion of
freedom, and a concept of human rights consistent with restrictions
on individual liberties.
As the international community has moved away from
a concept of human rights with freedom at its centre, conditioned
the realization of freedom on complex state policies, and encouraged
legislation limiting freedom of speech, Eurasianism’s idea of
freedom, while deeply at variance with the liberal tradition on
which international human rights were built, finds echoes in the
very ‘post-modern’ international human rights regime it scorns. As
noted above, since the 1993 Vienna Declaration, combating ‘hate
speech’ has increasingly become a concern of governmental and civil
international human rights organizations. These campaigns,
particularly in Western Europe, have been waged in the name of such
goals as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘promoting tolerance.’
They have been attacked as ‘politically correct’ attempts to
‘celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity’ (Steyn 2014).
Ironically, therefore, Eurasianism and the trends in international
human rights ultimately converge in restricting freedoms to achieve
cultural harmony, and while obscured by differing political and
cultural ideals, and by ideological labels that suggest vast
differences, they result in similar encroachments on individual
liberties.
Conclusion: the need for dialogue on the
meaning of human rights
Over 25 years since the fall of the communist
regimes, many civil and political rights have not been secured in
the vast majority of the former Soviet republics, despite decades of
civil society campaigning within these societies and the various
efforts of other states and international organizations, including
the OSCE. Citizens often lack access to independent courts, free and
independent media, free and fair elections, and freedom of
association, while religious freedom is often threatened. Human
rights protections have also deteriorated dramatically in Turkey,
and are often insufficient in EU member states. The obduracy of
repressive practices at variance with the freedoms envisioned by the
1975 Helsinki Accords has been tied to the persistence of political
cultures and mentalities, corruption, and ineffective efforts by the
international community. The international preoccupation with
terrorism and the instability of Middle Eastern countries has drawn
focus and resources from the Helsinki signatory states.
At the same time, the fragile consensus in the
1990s on implementing fundamental human rights standards in OSCE
participating States has given way to a more overt challenge to the
very concept of human rights embedded in the Helsinki Final Act.
Eurasianism poses a profound challenge to the classical liberal
ideal of universal, individual human rights based on a common human
nature; that is, to the principle that a central obligation of a
state is to protect the freedoms of its citizens, ideas that have
animated the international community since the end of World War II.
But the capacity to defend the right to basic
individual freedoms has arguably been weakened by the extension and
fragmentation of the concept of human rights, that is, by
developments in human rights discourse since the Helsinki Final Act.
A complex process driven by state actors opposed to Western liberal
democracies, as well as a diffuse array of civil society forces
seeking to merge a wide range of ‘social justice’ concerns into
human rights issues, has transformed human rights into a highly
ambiguous concept that can even be used to justify repression. There
is a danger that the focus on basic liberties has been diluted by an
expansive approach to the meaning of human rights, and by more and
more services and necessities being deemed ‘human rights’ in United
Nations declarations and by international courts.
Without a consensus on the meaning of human rights
and a sense of human rights priorities as placing emphasis on
respect for fundamental individual liberties, it is unlikely that
substantial further progress can be made on implementing the human
rights standards to which participating States of the OSCE have
formally committed themselves. The crucial importance of
international human rights standards to peaceful civil society
communities that are committed to the rule of law and are determined
to enjoy their internationally guaranteed human rights is even more
clear now than it was in 1975. Our cursory review of human rights
developments since Helsinki and the philosophical and political
challenges posed by Eurasianism suggests that after more than 40
years, the Helsinki human rights concept is more relevant than ever.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the authors.
References
Adams, J. R. 1984. “From Helsinki to Madrid.” In
Human Rights in Our Time: Essays in Memory of Victor Baras, edited
by Marc F. Plattner, 105–124. Boulder and London: Westview
Press. [Google Scholar]
Alexeyeva, L. 1985. Soviet Dissent Contemporary
Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press. [Google Scholar]
Barghoorn, F. C. 1966. Politics in the USSR.
Boston: Little Brown. [Google Scholar]
Boutros-Gali, B. 1993. Address by the Secretary
General of the United Nations at the Opening of the World Conference
on Human Rights.
Chalidze, V. 1975. To Defend These Rights, trans
G. Daniels. London: Collins and Harvill Press. [Google Scholar]
Chalidze, V. 1984. The Soviet Human Rights
Movement-A Memoire. New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute. [Google
Scholar]
Chalidze, V., and Richard Schifter. 1988. Glasnost
and Social and Economic Rights. Washington: Freedom House. [Google
Scholar]
Coalson, R. 2008. “Russian Conservatives Challenge
Notion of Universal Values.” RFE/RL, December 10, 2008.
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
1993. Contribution Submitted to the Preparatory Committee, United
Nations World Conference on Human Rights. Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.Conf.157/PC/62/Add.5.
Dugin, A. 2012. The Fourth Political Theory.
London: Arktos. [Google Scholar]
Foucault, M. 1991. Discipline and Punishment: The
Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin. [Google Scholar]
Goble, P. 2014a. “Putin Says Cultural Unity, Not
Passport Nationality, Is What Matters.” Window on Eurasia, April 24,
2014. Accessed April 1, 2014.
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.de/2014/04/window-on-eurasia-putin-says-cultural.html.
Goble, P. 2014b. “After Crimea, ‘One Spark’ Could
Engulf Russia in Pograms, Moscow Obsedrvers Say.” Window on
Eurasia,” May 17, 2014. Accessed April 1, 2015.
http://goo.gl/ezg7Fl.
Greenfeld, L. 1992. Five Roads to Modernity.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
Haraszti, M. 1988. The Velvet Prison. London: I.B.
Tauris. [Google Scholar]
Human Rights First. February 27 2014. “Spread of
Russian-Style Anti-Propaganda Laws”. Washington DC and New York.
Human Rights First. Accessed March 2, 2015.
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/spread-russian-style-propaganda-laws.
Human Rights First. January 8 2015. “Russia
Includes Transgender Status on List of Driver’s License Medical
Restrictions.” Washington DC and New York. Human Rights First.
Accessed March 15, 2015.
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/press-release/russia-includes-transgender-status-list-driver-s-license-medical-restrictions.
Illarionov, A. 2014. “Remarks.” NATO Parliamentary
Assembly, May 31. Accessed March 15, 2014.
http://goo.gl/4SngXk.
Kadarkay, A. 1982. Human Rights in American and
Russian Political Thought. Lanham: University Press of
America. [Google Scholar]
Kis, J. 2006. “Untitled Text.” In Human Rights in
the Democracy Movement Twenty Years Ago – Human Rights Today.
Budapest: Hungarian Helsinki Committee, 46–60. [Google Scholar]
Lord, C. 1984. “Human Rights Policy in a
Nonliberal World.” In Human Rights in Our Time: Essays in Memory of
Victor Baras, edited by Marc F. Plattner, 125–139. Boulder and
London: Westview Press. [Google Scholar]
Malvicini, G. 2014. “Dugin on the Subject of
Politics.” North American New Right. September 12.
McHangama, J. 2011. The Sordid Origins of Hate
Speech Laws. Policy Review, December 1, 2011. Accessed March 30,
2015.
http://goo.gl/W0yhbO.
Moskowitz, M. 1979. “Implementing Human Rights:
Present Status and Future Prospects.” In Human Rights Thirty Years
After the Universal Declaration, edited by B. Ramcharan, 109–130.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhof. [Google Scholar]
Neier, A. 2012. The International Human Rights
Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.[CrossRef], [Google
Scholar]
Pillay, N. 2013. “Letter to UN delegations.” June
6. Accessed March 30, 2015.
http://goo.gl/sEIWK1.
Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting
Institute. March 14, 2014. “The Russian Connection.” Accessed April
15, 2015.
http://www.riskandforecast.com/useruploads/files/pc_flash_report_russian_connection.pdf.
Rhodes, A. 2014. “Combating Eurasia’s Challenge to
Basic Human Rights.” Washington Times, June 25.
Russian Orthodox Church. 2008. Basic Principles of
the Russian Church Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom, and Rights.
Accessed February 15, 2015.
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=reference&div=7.
Siskova, A. 2008. “Russian Orthodox Church Sets
Tone on Human Rights.” RFE/RL, June 30.
Steyn, M. 2014. “The Slow Death of Free Speech.”
The Spectator, 19 April.
Tucker, A. 2000. The Philosophy and Politics of
Czech Dissidents from Patochka to Havel. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburg Press. [Google Scholar]
Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Group. 1977[1987].
“A Manifesto of the Ukrainian Human Rights Movement.” 1977 in U.S.
Congress, U.S. Helsinki Commission, Documents of the Helsinki
Monitoring Groups in the USSR and Lithuania (1976-1986), Vol. 3,
93–115. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987.
Whelan, D. J. 2010. Indivisible Human Rights: A
History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]
|
