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Chapter 11 Eastern Europe: The Russian Federation Carol Skalnik Leff Human rights politics play out within a complex web ofdomestic and transnational relationships. As Thomas Risse-Kappen (1994) says, "ideas do not float freely"; they are encapsulated in normative regimes that are incorporated into institutional structures and championed by concrete actors embedded in political networks. An examination of these actors and institutional structures is critical to explaining the outcomes ofRussian human rights battles after communism; these battles have been fought in a transnational setting in which the domestic and foreign linkages must be specified. Before tackling this task, it is sensible to ask what is meant by a human rights agenda. One can, of course, set a broad-gauged agenda that encompasses an extensive checklist of social and economic rights as well as civil and political ones. This is the format adopted in the annual U.S. State Department assessments of human rights. This generalized approach has some useful payoffs for performing summary comparative analyses across cases. However, a politically operative agenda of human rights would be defined rather differently; the very term "agenda" presupposes that relevant political actors are setting priorities within a larger possible universe of human rights concerns. The criterion for this agenda formation need not be the urgency of the issue; it may be its amenability to resolution, its salience as a focus of international concern, or the fact that it is an issue around which concerned actors are ready to mobilize. What is important is to identify which actors are engaged in issue definition, and what human rights issues are of central concern to them. Agendas vary in specificity, scope, and salience, as well as in the enforcement power able to be mobilized to pursue defined objectives. All this is relevant to outcomes in the form of human rights observance. In this chapter, therefore, I will be looking at two clusters ofactors--states, multilaterals, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the international environment and the Russian government, party system, and NGOs Eastern Europe: The Russian Federation 199 in the domestic environment-as well as at their agendas and the strategic context in which these actors operate. The agenda that emerges from this examination is a more limited one, with the highest profile issues, as defined by the agenda-setters, being the conduct of military operations and the treatment ofconscripts; restrictions on mobility and foreign travel imposed by the survival of the Soviet-era "propiska" or residence permit in defiance of constitutional strictures and court rulings; and pathologies of the criminal justice system. In this analysis, I will first set out the basic features of Russian domestic rights politics, and then turn to the interface between this political environment and the key transnational actors engaged in monitoring , and trying to influence, the Russian human rights agenda. The Domestic Politics of Human Rights in Russia It is important briefly to review the human rights regime that characterized Soviet Russia. Although human rights were widelyviolated, there was a logic for the pattern of observance and nonobservance-a fundamentally statist logic rooted in Germanjurisprudence and Soviet ideology. Russian legal analyst A. Chistyakova pinpoints three defining principles ofclassic Soviet theory and practice: the state as "the sole source ofhuman rights," without recourse to any higher universal principle, with concomitant government authority to define and constrain how these rights would operate in practice; the subordination of individual needs to those of the state; and the primacy of social and economic rights over civil and political ones (Bowring 1995, 89). This legacy must be taken seriously in both negative and affirmative terms-in negative terms because of the burdensome legacies imposed by a politicized legal system, and in affirmative terms because the emphasis on social and economic rights as fundamental has persisted in public perception . Today the Russian government, public, and human rights NGOs all share, to varying degrees, a recognition of economic security as a fundamentally resonant value and human entitlement. Thus the human rights activists have joined calls to pay arrears in salaries and pensions, viewing government responsibility in this area as the manifestation ofa basic human right to security. In other respects, the rights logic of the post-communist state would appear to have changed dramatically. Article 2 of the post-Soviet Russian constitution turned the earlier statist logic on its head, touting the supremacy of individual rights and freedoms. Thirty-five articles codify specific political, civil, and socioeconomic rights that have the additional standing , in contrast with the Soviet...

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