Window on Eurasia

Russia’s Human Rights Community Denounced for ‘Seven Sins’

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 25, 2006 – Human rights activists in the Russian Federation
have only themselves to blame for their declining influence in broader
society and the crisis in which their community finds itself, according
to a commentary published this week in a leading Moscow business
newspaper.

Indeed, Maksim Grigor’yev argues in “Vzglyad,” these activists
are guilty of “seven sins” which if not yet deadly to those who have
committed them nonetheless have opened the way for others to promote a
specifically Russian view of just what human rights are and how they
should be defended
[http://www.dpni.org/index.php?0++7091].

The first “sin” of Russian human rights activists, according to
Grigor’yev, is their “involvement in the struggle against Russia
during Soviet times” and their view of the United States as most
important definer of what human rights are and how they should be
protected.

Their second “sin” is related to the first: the continued
orientation of these activists toward Western countries “and
especially the United States.” Their third “sin” consists of
“double standards and selective defense of rights,” particularly
their failure to defend ethnic Russians against Baltic governments.

The fourth “sin” of the Russian Federation’s human rights
community includes its “defense of Chechen terrorists” and its
tendency to accept all criticisms of the Russian authorities as valid
while ignoring the government’s defense of what it is doing in this
case and elsewhere.

Their fifth “sin,” Grigor’yev suggests, is direct participation
in the struggle for power in Russia, something that he argues compromises
their credibility as spokesmen for human rights. Their sixth is a
tendency to ignore the plight of “concrete individuals” and to
focus on broad issues.

And the seventh “sin” of this community, the “Vzglyad” writer
says, is that they are increasingly isolated from contemporary Russian
society and living off past glories: Indeed, he suggests, one is
justified in speaking “about the formation of a human rights
aristocracy or beaumonde.”

“The defense of the rights of people is extremely important both for
Russian society and for the government,” Grigor’yev argues, and
consequently, it is vitally important that those involved in this fight
understand both what should be involved in it and how the current human
rights community in Russia has gone astray.

If those concerned with defending the rights of the Russian Federation
population are to get back on track, he says, they must first of all
recognize that “in the mentality of the Russian [rossiiskiy] people,
this work is connected not only with the term ‘human rights’ but
also with ‘truth’ and ‘justice.’”

Second, the older generation of human rights activists, who he suggests
is living off their reputations gained from fighting the Soviet state a
generation ago, must give way to a new group that better understands
and reflects the new post-Soviet reality of Putin’s Russia.

And third – and in a nod to the Kremlin’s stated concerns about
foreign financing of human rights and other groups – Grigor’yev
argues that there must be “a diversification of the sources of
support” for rights groups lest they be viewed as partisans rather
than advocates of the general good.

Who these new advocates of human rights might be and what they might
advocate were suggested by three articles elsewhere in the Russian
media this week. In the first, Russian nationalist Pavel Svyatenkov suggested
that current human rights activists behind what he called a dangerous
wave of “repressive tolerance” on Russian society.

According to Svyatenkov, tolerance in the Russian case has “acquired
a repressive character” in which society is called upon to accept
“any evil directed against it” – be it Chechen terrorism or
homosexuality. Consequently, he said, Russia must develop “its own
conception” of rights
[http://www.dpni.org/index.php?0==7103].

In an interview in “Vechernyaya Moskva” yesterday, Metropolitan
Kirill, who heads the influential External Affairs Department of the
Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, argued as he has in
the past that Russia needs its own definition of human rights
[http://www.vmdaily.ru/main/viewarticle.php?id=26480].

He argued that this conception must “combine the idea of rights and
freedoms with the idea of moral responsibility,” lest society
degenerate. Those who absolutize rights, as the human rights community
does, thus open the door to disaster, the metropolitan said.

Many of them argue on behalf of homosexual marriage, Kirill continued,
and in some Western countries, they have already succeeded in gaining
legal support for that view. “You know what will be the next step?”
the church hierarch asked his interviewer: It will be the legalization
of “pedophilia!”

And third, Nikolai Mikhaylov argued on the Russian Civilization website
on Wednesday that the true measure of democratization “IN THE GOOD
SENSE OF THE WORD” in Russia is “not the quantity of
‘independent’ candidates in elections at any level and not in the
amount of erotic programs on television, but rather the realizatiin of
the NATURAL rights and freedom”
[http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid=26829].

And the most “basic” human right is the right to defend oneself,
one’s family, one’s property and one’s nation. And the only way
for a Russian to guarantee that essential right is to have the right to
bear arms and to be able to use them in defense of these values.

Some in Russia and elsewhere might welcome such a shift from existing
principles of international human rights, but others are certain to be
disturbed not only by this latest attack on those who have worked so
hard to promote democracy, freedom and human rights and on their
increasingly threatened legacy.

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