Anna Karetnikova

10 December 2024

by Anna Karetnikova

Source: Facebook

Congratulations all around on International Human Rights Day 

In the beginning, I had a hard time understanding human rights, even though I’m a lawyer. Whereas with all those casuistic rights that need to be teased out of laws—consumer rights, workers’ and employers’ rights—I was fine with those. But when it comes specifically to basic human rights, at that point for some reason I stop being a lawyer first and foremost and become primarily an empath. I start from my own feelings and notions of what I would feel if my rights were violated like, say, that young fellow over there who they’re torturing. Or that lady over there who they actually killed. Or the child starving to death.

On the one hand, this is incorrect. I can be wrong and so each time go back to the Declaration to see whether some unlucky person has that right or not. On the other hand, probably my personal emotions, evoked by what in my view is happening unfairly, give me greater stimulus to act than when I analyze and see that some declared right is indeed being violated. In general, though, I’ve made peace with the faсt that I’ve put the cart before the horse: I haven’t fouled things up too badly, I don’t think, but it’s never too late to check the regs. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s from my childhood, when I still didn’t know how to check the laws but injustice already made me angry.

I even think that that’s probably the way it should be. After all, there are lots of lawyers, but more often it is those who above all feel others’ pain who take up defending human rights. No, doubtless in the arbitration process trial participants experience suffering and torment, but this is slightly different. So that in general for me human rights are not a symbol of belief, not a job, and not even a religion but a kind of eternal struggle with varying results where others’ pain echoes in me.

Congratulations on the Day with tears in everyone’s eyes—lawyers’ and non-lawyers’, those who have a similar sense of these same human rights, with all their pluses and minuses and especially hidden hazards in a time as complicated as today. Our petitions mean more than we think, and our efforts are important not only for the victims: they are necessary for something in the future. At least, so it seems to me.

Translated by Marian Schwartz