?
Human Rights and the Exceptionalism of Russian Law and Politics
This chapter examines the role of human rights as the reference point for concrete-order thinking in Russia’s legal order and the political implications of changes in conceptualization of human rights over the last few decades. This change has had an evident impact on Russian law and on its interplay with the West and its institutions. The chapter singles out three different readings of human rights in Russian law and politics, from initial enthusiasm about Russia joining Western civilization and its unreserved acceptance of human rights in the 1993 Constitution, to a critical revision of the conception of human rights in the 2000s, and finally to its instrumentalization as one of the pillars for Russian exceptionalism and anti-globalist geopolitical strategy in the 2020s.