Human rights concepts in the OSCE region: changes since the Helsinki Final Act

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.