Week-ending 5 March 2021
“Human rights as a concept are under attack. […] We can agree to respect rights and freedoms and help each other do so. We can join together to deny them (this is bad, but it preserves and maybe even increases their value). But pretending that we have agreed to observe them, while in reality violating them and using them as an aggressive tool for promoting political and economic interests – this undermines trust and makes human rights a cheap tool for political games. […] Unfortunately, the long-term custodians of the stone tablets on which are inscribed the world’s moral standards cannot withstand the challenges of the times, either. Under external pressure, they degrade from within. […] The time of large organizations claiming to define universal good and evil is over. Maybe some day it will return, but today Navalny is a political prisoner and a prisoner of conscience for objective reasons, as a result of political reprisals against him by a demonstrably unfair judicial process. Amnesty International’s opinion is irrelevant here.”
-Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora International Human Rights Group
Source:
Pavel Chikov, ‘Human rights as a concept are under attack,’ Rights in Russia, 27 February 2021 [translation of a text republished here Moscow Helsinki Group from the original on Facebook]
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