Natalia NAROCHNITSKAYA

President, Foundation for Historical Outlook

Chairman, The RF State Duma Commission for Studies of Practical Observance of Human Rights and Basic Freedoms, Supervision over their Observance in Foreign States

Ph.D. (History)

It has been a long time since the issue of human rights was deliberately transformed into nearly the main aspect of social life in the Western civilization. The informational field is overwhelmed by worn-out cliches, stereotypes and prejudices against some countries whereas others are assigned a nearly infallible status and presumptuously play the mentor role. Human rights, democracy, and the rights of minorities have evolved into instruments for the partition of "undesirable" countries insubordinate to global control and into pretexts for using force against sovereign states, even though this is prohibited by the UN Charter.

The Commission for studies of practical observance of human rights and basic freedoms, supervision over their observance in foreign states is a new parliamentary structure of the RF State

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Duma established to contribute to Russia's potential of equal and full-scale participation in the human rights debate on the international arena, in the development of substantiated and nondiscriminatory international criteria in this area, and in the control of their fair use in international practice.

After the fall of the bipolar system of international relations and the violation of the balance of forces in the world which had made the leading powers adhere to the classic international law, the topic of human rights rapidly became a powerful tool of undisguised political pressure in international affairs. As for international organizations, a number of them that had little influence previously now assume the roles of self-proclaimed arbiters with the authority to grant or to deny "certificates of the civilized status".

Having adopted the doctrine of joining the "global civilized community" after the demise of the "iron curtain" Russia largely helped the West to assume the mission of arbitration in this area. At the present time the messianic international politics of the US openly justifies expansion just as it used to be in the times of Theodore Roosevelt's rough imperialism. The US dictates to other countries on their domestic democratic routines, intimidates them with sanctions and military invasions. The global result is a growing sense of the bankruptcy of the Western value system and the democratic ideals in international politics, of neglect for the spirit and meaning of the UN Charter, plus the intensifying rejection of the US ambitions to set criteria, judge, and punish with no regard for the international law. Moreover, double standards are applied and rebukes are addressed to those sovereign countries that do not accept dictate.

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A regular report of the US Department of State on the global human rights situation echoed with indignation worldwide. The obvious tensions between different civilizations in the world and a perilous escalation of interethnic and inter-religious frictions in Western societies are some of the consequences deplorable for the West itself and destabilizing the entire world system.

The activities of the Parliamentary Commission should not be limited to a simple recording of human rights abuses in various countries. It should also diversify the instruments and enhance the potential for protecting human rights, especially those of our countrymen in the post-Soviet space, and systematically identify both the positive experience and the double standards practiced by other countries and international organizations, including human rights watch goups, in their assessments of the human rights situations in various parts of the world. Only this way can we establish a substantial basis for an active involvement and prevent the transformation of the human rights debate into an instrument of political pressure on states.

The Commission deems it necessary to work on the generalization and analysis in this area in a broad cooperation with the Russian analytical organizations, experts communities, and practical specialists. The Commission considers Russia's priorities in this area to be:

Studies and a comparative analysis of the available approaches to the practice and interpretation of human rights and basic liberties adopted by various countries and international organizations, including the ones watching human rights;

A systematization of data on both known violations of human rights and basic liberties and on the positive experience of

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other countries in legislature and law enforcement; a verification of the fairness of assessments of human rights situations in various parts of the world by international organizations and governments;

* A comparison of the human rights interpretation and observance criteria in different cultures and states which is to facilitate the development of unified and substantiated standards concerning human rights and basic liberties for the corresponding international activity;

* A comparative analysis of cases of unsatisfactory human rights treatments in Russia and abroad, which must identify the legislative and law-enforcement causes of deficiencies in the human rights provisions in Russia in a broad legal and socio-cultural field.

Interethnic and religious conflicts, the emergence of an entire range of problems related to the life of ethnic minorities, and the transformation of some population groups into minorities due to dramatic changes on the map of Europe are among the reasons for deteriorating human rights situations.

The recent (Budapest, May 17, 2006) conference of the PACE Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee showed that some countries practice conflicting approaches to literally all aspects of the issue. The Council of Europe and it's institutions, which are so united and notoriously harsh when adopting resolutions against Russia on any occasions and which showered Serbia and the Serbs with allegations of abusing the rights of the openly separatist Kosovo Albanians, are inclined to treat gently the West-European

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members of the Council of Europe when they fail comply with even the most agreeable provisions. For example, the report on the ratification of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities indicates that some of the countries (France, Andorra, Monaco, Turkey) refrain from endorsing it altogether, some (Belgium, Greece, Iceland, and Luxembourg) do not intend to ratify it despite having endorsed it, and some (Latvia) ratify it with exceptions which render meaningless the already loose obligations of the Convention. It transpired during the debate that there is no consensus on the very definition of a minority, and that concepts generally rejecting this term are also advocated (France). Besides, some countries vehemently oppose being mentioned in the Resolution.

Yet the issue of the rights of ethnic minorities, that has already manifested itself in the drama of the Russian population in the Baltic region and is crucial to the preservation' of the national identity of 2 5 mln Russians in the CIS, obviously tends to play a role in Eastern Europe, and appears likely to entail tough problems in South-Eastem Europe and the Balkans in the future. It also tends to get pronounced in Western Europe itself. Russia with its growing potential focuses its international politics more and more on advocating human rights of the partitioned Russian nation, a fraction of which found itself in the position of a national minority overnight.

The Russian-speaking population is denied full civilian and political rights in the Baltic states. The right to speak and to think in Russian in Ukraine is under attack. The very survival and preservation of the national identity of the Russian nation in the CIS represent a serious problem. Religious and ethnic strife

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escalates in Europe. Finally, double standards in ethnic and religious conflicts are used to reshape borders in Europe (Kosovo) and terrorism is encouraged as a weapon against the territorial integrity of countries (Chechnya). The above makes it necessary to study systematically an entire range of aspects of life experience of ethnic minorities.

In the interests of efficient struggle against human rights abuses in this area it is vital to have knowledge on various philosophic foundations of the human rights concepts adopted by different civilizations, to analyze and to understand all the pertinent international mechanisms, as well as to perform case studies of various countries and double standard instances.

The present edition written in direct cooperation with the Commission includes a collection of diverse materials giving an idea of the vast scope of problems and aspects of the life of ethnic minorities. It is necessary to get familiarized with the legal approaches to the most important of the corresponding concepts and with the international regulation documents currently in effect. A study of philosophic foundations of the Islamic concept of human rights provides an example of divergences in their interpretations in different civilizations, whose representatives share countries and live side by side with Europeans in the globalizing world. Unfortunately so far the western ethnopolitology and the West European state practice are prone to ignore these aspects despite the ominous crisis of the civilian nation concept, the proportions of the challenge to the traditional European societies posed by migration, and the obvious inability of these societies to understand the reasons of their vulnerability due to their nearly Marxist belief in the omnipotence of "ideal universal social institutions".

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The case of double standards being used to partition Serbia exemplifies the perils encountered by multiethnic states. It is no less important to examine the relatively positive experience of many centuries of neighborly life of nations in Europe.

However, for instance, reports of international human rights watch groups indicate that in Germany the conditions of national, racial and religious minorities in terms of human rights deteriorated following the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts in the US and the adoption of an antiterrorist law. Ethnic and religious tensions escalate as the Muslim community grows (33 mln out of the 82 mln of the total population). The deliberate disrespect of some mass media for Islam and the disproportional attention of law enforcement agencies to Muslims also tell on the public atmosphere.

The British Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism notes a steady increase in the anti-Muslim activities in this country. Last year 919 out of 12,000 hate crimes were due to religious intolerance, which is a two-fold increase compared to the previous year. According to the data of the Open Society Institute in Great Britain about 80% of its 1.6 mln Muslims have to some extent suffered from religious discrimination.

In 2004 the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights recorded 1,556 racist and anti-Semitic demarches compared to 833 in 2003. The number of incidents of this kind in schools tripled. The commission collected evidence about 595 demarches against migrants whereas only 232 of them were registered in 2003.

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According to the Austrian non-government organization ZARA ethnic and religious minorities residing in Austria face an increasing discrimination by law enforcement agencies, which is a more serious problem than the already habitual racism in everyday life.

A progressing alienation of the Muslim community from the rest of the society is taking place in the Netherlands. The number of Muslims who report offenses in various forms is growing. The campaign of the authorities against Islamophobia conducted under the slogans of democracy and liberalism yields limited results due to the authorities failure to understand the fundamental causes of the crisis of the European civilization. According to polls one out of five Dutchmen shares stereotypes against Jews.

The Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism in Belgium received almost 1,000 complaints about violation of rights of individuals seeking training and jobs. The racial and religious intolerance acts recorded in Belgium in 2005 mostly targeted Jews and also Muslims, predominantly Moroccans and Turks. Alienation progresses between the two parts of the Belgian original population, namely the inhabitants of the protestant Flandreau and the Catholic francophone Brabant.

The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance disclosed facts of discrimination against immigrants in Switzerland. In particular the Commission expressed a concern over "the growth of racism and discrimination against black Africans". The Federal Commission Against Racism in Switzerland

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reports an escalation of the public pressure on religious minorities and their organizations.

The US Department of State annual human rights report describes a growing xenophobia in European countries. At the same time violent crime against ethnic minorities is on the rise in the US. The October, 2005 FBI report says that 53.8% of the 9,528 victims of hate crimes in 2004 were victims of racial prejudice and that 67.9% of them were African Americans. 60.6% of those guilty of hate crimes were white Americans.

A study of the Swedish radio which polled 80,000 local Muslims showed that half of the Muslim organizations in Sweden received threats regularly and a third of them had been attacked. The special service agencies in Sweden report a 40% annual increase in crime against Jews, most of them being related to the Nazi ideology.

In January, 2003 Finland adopted legislation on changes in the criminal code which must include racist motivation in the list of aggravating circumstances and introduce responsibility for the membership in organizations advocating or provoking racial discrimination. Nonetheless, the level of racist and xenophobic leaning is high among some strata of the country's population, particularly among the young people. Human rights watch groups say that one of the reasons making victims of racial discrimination refrain from filing complaints is their belief that this will yield no result.

From Humanistic Universalism to Global Control

The European civilization is progressively losing its unique identity. This is what makes it vulnerable, though initially the universalism

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of democracy was open to the entire world and appeared to be a humanistic appeal for understanding between civilizations. Nowadays these ideas mainly serve as a pretext for interfering with the domestic affairs of sovereign countries and for the establishment of global control.

The tendency of interpreting the basic human rights and freedoms as universal gained new momentum after World War II with the creation of the first universal international organization -the UN. The UN Charter embodied for the fist time in history the very idea of globally recognized standards concerning not only the relations between countries, but also those between people within countries. A recognition and observance of these standards was incorporated into the basic principles of the international law. But the UN Charter combines the human rights with such foundations of the international law as noninterference in the domestic affairs of countries and their sovereign equality. The UN Charter provides a list of basic human rights without giving them any meaningful interpretation. Obviously, this is so for a reason since the interpretation of the meaning of these rights depends all too strongly on the axiological criteria inherent in various civilizations.

But the universalistic idea also gave rise to an organization of a different type - the Council of Europe. This is a purely ideological organization established to transform the international law, namely, the law regulating the relations between nations, into a "World Civilian Law", or a "WorldLaw". Its current role shows that in anticipation of a "better time" it has been accumulating the failed universalistic aspirations to rule the world on the basis of "eternal' standards rooted in the cosmopolitan and anti-Christian doctrines of the past. An entire mentality of the

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citizens of the world grew on this nutrient broth. Clearly the Council of Europe was created as a strategic reserve and for a long time it remained uninvolved in the scope of all the serious issues and aspects of the global politics. As long as the classic international law with its influential guarantors dominated the world this institution did not play a considerable role in the international politics. But once the ideology's impact on people's mentalities made it possible to challenge the sovereignty of nation-states and to promote the idea of global control and "arbitration" by supranational formations, the time came for the Council of Europe.

Watching the activities of the Council of Europe from inside and exploring its conceptual basis one cannot but conclude that it is dominated by the extreme-left liberal school of thought and a nearly Trotskyite messianic spirit of enforcement of unreligious and non-national standards. The program documents of the Council of Europe never even mention the term "sovereignty".

This is exactly the reason why an aggressive tactics and a conceptual investigation in systematizing the human rights are long overdue. A generalization of the historical experience of the rise, preeminence, and the subsequent decline of spiritual criteria in the design of historical concepts combined with an analysis of the significance of the cultural context in the human rights issues would make it possible to develop methods of a comparativistic interpretation of the human rights category depending on the religious and philosophic foundations of the mentalities in various civilizations of the world. At present no theory of this kind is available.

A separation of the genuine democracy in the interpretation of human rights from the liberal-totalitarian

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"axiological nihilism" and a strict opposition to the practice of double standards must become a major conceptual and methodological milestone.

It is also important to understand the history and the classification of the human rights. Three generations of the human rights concept are defined in political science, sociology and the science on political theories and human rights.

1. The first generation of the human rights comprises civil and political rights such as gender and national equality, freedom of conscience and religion, of speech, assembly, political unions, equality before law, inviolability of home, freedom from arbitrary arrest, etc. These rights were proclaimed after the French Revolution in the struggle against absolutism, despotism, the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, and the judicial inequality of estates. The above rights are of an unquestionable and imperishable value and have long been universally accepted. They are included in the UN Charter.

2. The second generation comprises social and economic rights. They were declared in the XX century, and it must be recognized that their being upheld in Russia after the Revolution has stimulated the Western countries to move in the same direction. These are the rights to work, housing, equal pay for equal labour, and also the right not to be discriminated due to gender, race, nationality, and age. They also include a ban or a limitation of children's labor, limited working hours, pensions and excess to medical care. The 20th century provides a permanent momentum towards a further improvement of this category of human rights. These two generations of human rights were included in UN Charter, the 1948 Universal declaration of Human Rights, and International covenants of human rights of 1966.

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It should be noted that it took 18 years to coordinate the contents of the covenants, which reflects the complexity of elaborating common approaches to the list, to say nothing of criteria for so different civilizations.

3. Finally, the third generation of human rights are the ones written on the messianic banners of the present-day "libertarian revolution" promoted by the Council of Europe - the so-called humanitarian rights. Namely these are the rights of an individual, which the West with its purely liberal criteria tends to interpret as universal and independent of the individual's identifying with a particular country or with any civilizations, religious and philosophic systems. Obviously, this approach can only be founded on a secular doctrine which denies aggressively any notions of good and evil, sin and virtue originating from religions and passing from generation to generation regardless of individual attitudes to it.

This is the category of human rights which is perceived differently by different civilizations, since they differ in their understandings of what is a human being. Potentially this very category of human rights can conflict with the moral standards which may not be formalized in constitutions, not just in Orthodox Russia, but also in Europe, where conservatives are concerned over the dismantling of the European Christian culture.

However, preachers of "liberal freedom" in Europe and in Russia lambaste any limitations of this "freedom" presenting them as a suppression of the rights for "information ", "choice", and "creative freedom". Like the Bolsheviks, they hate Christianity which is an indispensable source of the spiritual development of an individual.

Notably, more and more often the militant libertarian interpretation of the individual freedom and rights

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contradicts the first-generation human rights such as freedom of religion and opinion, thus eroding the very basis of democracy. From the libertarian point of view Christians are no longer entitled to express judgments which are a part of their religious doctrine. We see this happening in Europe!

Even a brief review of the three generations of human rights demonstrates that the first of them refers to the concept of democracy, the second - to the concept of a socially responsible state (by the way the latter is motivated by the Christian commandments to care for the neighbor), and the third - to liberalism. Democracy is a constitutional and functional category, a category of form. Carl Schmitt, a prominent German philosopher, noted that democracy has no axiological meaning and is merely an organizational form. It requires no unity of worldview and can be implemented via a cooperation of various ideologies. This is the sole reason why democracy became an optimal mechanism for a pluralistic society without a unifying ideal.

The experience of democracy in the XX century is that of a massive and fairly successful adoption of democratic constitutions and establishment of democratic institutes on all continents. This is a sufficient reason to recognize its universalism.

But liberalism is a philosophy and a worldview which determine the axiological content of the categories of humanitarian human rights. At its early stage it rebelled against a compulsory religious state which certainly did justify untruthfully the inequality of individuals and non-economic foundations of the social hierarchy alleging that this order of things was of a sacral origin. These days it becomes more and more obvious that liberalism degenerates into libertarianism intolerant to all other

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ideas and to any tradition. So far Europe seems to be in denial that it is the axiological nihilism preached by the leftist pan-European organizations that makes Christian West-European societies vulnerable to the influences of migrants identifying with other civilizations.

The axiological nihilism is in essence a philosophy of the end of history. In this case Europe puts an end to its quest for the meaning of existence which originated from the spirit once sensitive to the opposition of good and evil. What remains is a technocratic civilization. It is no longer a metaphysical Rome which was the invisible center of the global history, but the pagan Rome with its panic fear of physical imperfection, aging, and death. But such Rome has already been swept away by Alaric the First, King of the Visigoths, despite all of its material superiority - the thermae, the water supply system, the Coliseum, and the Forum. At present technocracy is powerless against migrants not because of their numbers and otherness, but because its motherland is where taxes are lower and because nothing is holy for Europe itself - everything is about computers and "rights" which migrants vest with a meaning sacred for them.

It is time to pay attention to the fact that, despite the Western world's definite achievements in human rights and its generally high level of culture in the relations of institutions and officials with citizens, the human rights situation in European countries and the US is far from being perfect and is in some respects in a state of a deep crisis. At the same time these very countries adopt the role of human rights mentors.

Massive ethnic and religious unrest in France was by no means due to social problems alone. We witness an overall escalation of tensions

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between civilizations instead of a harmonization which might be a logical development in the globalization epoch. Among other reasons this is a result of imposing an extremely libertarian interpretation of the concept of an individual, his rights and freedoms on all of the civilizations with their unique mentalities stemming from their diverse religions and philosophies.

A profound crisis of democracy and a limitation of human rights are evident in the US. This even includes a freedom of speech limitation, though Washington addresses this very charge to insubordinate countries. Influential nongovernmental human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc.) regularly report increasingly frequent infringements on the basic human rights and freedoms in the leading Western countries, primarily in the US and the EU. Some of these abuses occur in the context of the antiterrorist campaign. According to the Human Rights Watch 2005 Report the proportions of the problem are due to the readiness of a number of Western countries to sacrifice the basics of human rights to the interests of their fight against terrorism. This results in double standards of the assessment of other countries' activities and in the tendency to assign political and economic considerations a priority over human rights.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist act President Bush authorized the National Security Agency and other services to eavesdrop on US citizens even though by law they can only do this with a special court warrant. At least 287 cases of illegal electronic surveillance are reported in 2002 - 2004. In a remarkable case, an FBI agent tapped the phone of a US citizen for 5 years without notice to the Department of Justice. New York Times writes that

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the agency has a technical potential to tap up to 500 people inside the country and up to 7,000 people abroad.

The US Administration tightened the domestic regime under the slogan of antiterrorist activity. The introduction of the so-called Patriot Act (a directive to create instruments to prevent terrorist acts) and the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security are a substantial expansion of the power of special services to watch anyone considered suspicious. In particular, the process of obtaining court warrants for eavesdropping on suspects, for the interception of mail and e-mail, for searches and monitoring has been simplified. Authority is now afforded to law enforcement to request library and bookstore records, as well as confidential information from companies about their clients. On December 21, 2005 the US Congress approved a renewal of the Patriot Act, and now there is a debate on abolishing the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which will not apply to federal employees! One cannot but recall A. de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", where he pays tribute to the rational organization of the society but remarks that on the whole he does not know another country where the freedom of speech and spirit is so limited as in the US.

Generally the US, while preaching freedom and calling others "police regimes", is on top of the world's list in terms of the per capita number of convicts. The situation in France concerning the issues for which Russia is typically criticized is also far from ideal. Having inspected the preliminary detention center of the Palace of Justice in Paris Mr. Alvaro Gil-Robles, the former Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe, said that he has never seen a more horrible place in his life anywhere except for Moldova and suggested to close it immediately.

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According to the French Ministry of Justice last year jails were overpopulated 112%. Independent organizations report poor hygiene, cases of deprivation of medical and other assistance, a spread of drug dependence, and a growing number of suicides among convicts. This information is found in a report of an international organization monitoring the conditions in prisons.

The liberal project, which proclaims its interpretation of many of the humanitarian rights as universal, corrupts all the unique civilizations and at the same time suppresses the human rights and liberties in the countries promoting it. This turns the struggle for human rights into a farce and a mere instrument of global control. All the aspects of this project must be analyzed in detail due to its danger to democracy.

Commission undertakes the obviously complicated work of systemizing the data on human rights violations in the West and in the US. This work will be hindered by an intense oposition, as well as by objective difficulties and outdated stereotypes. Yet this very work is now necessary not only for Russia, but also for Europe.

RA

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