Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Human Rights in Russia
Human Rights in Russia
This paper will examine about promoting human rights in Russia by supporting NGOs.
In my opinion, there are 3 strategy of European Union (EU) to promote human rights
in Russia which include monitoring and reporting human rights situations, bring
human rights NGOs into EU-Russia human right dialogue and spend considerable
financial resources. The outline for this paper included introduction, background of
the Russian human rights NGOs, theoretical framework using in this paper is
liberalism approach, strategies of EU to promote human rights in Russia and
conclusion.
In the recent decades, number of the NGOs in Russia has growing rapidly. Russia is
the third largest trading partner of the EU and the economic factors have play a
dominant role in determining the EU's human rights policies vis-??-vis Russia. In
2001, Russia was home to approximately about 19,500 human rights NGOs which
constituted approximately 5% of all registered NGOs. The human rights movement
has experienced rapid geographical expansion while throughout the entire Soviet
period the movement was almost completely concentrated in the Moscow and the
human rights NGOs operate in all 89 regions of the Russian Federation. Since 2005,
the EU and Russia have held twice-yearly consultations on human rights. On 17
November 2010, the latest round of the consultation on human rights was held. The
EU was raising the number of concerns which relate to the specific human rights
issues in the Russian Federation. It was include the issue pertaining to freedom of
speech and assembly, prison conditions and ill treatment by law enforcement
agencies and impunity.
Besides that, Russian human rights NGOs are considerably diverse in size, structure
and policy ambit. Therefore, they set the agenda, establish standards, monitor and
advocate enforcement, and act as aid and education organizations within the field of
human rights. However, it does not engage many Russian. This is because the
challenge has contributed to this situation such as many Russian human rights NGOs
lack carefully designed policies of strategic interaction with the public and media.
NGO failures of public communication also can explain by one of their difficult
normative context. Russian perceives human rights in terms of three distinct
normative dimensions which include civil liberties, economic rights and individual
rights. One of the challenges faced by Russian human rights NGO is a resistant
domestic normative context. Building cooperative engagements with the government
and establishing themselves in state-dominated policy networks is another challenge
for the Russian human rights NGOs.
In general, mechanisms and practices among human rights NGOs in Russia is an
important characteristic of the Russian human rights NGO community. This is due to
its intense involvement in various national and transnational knowledge, advocacy
and policy based networks. Moreover, interaction between human rights NGOs at
both Russian and European level has created forums where the information is
transmitted and expertise is shared.
On the other hand, I would like to use the liberalism approach to relate this topic.
This is because liberalism is a political and social philosophy advocating individual
freedom, representational forms of government, progress and reform and protection
of civil liberties. EU policy presupposes the existence of non-state actors who can be
motivated to pressure governments to conform to human rights norms.
State actors act rationally to pursue strategic interests. However, it recognizes that
decisions at EU level must meet the interaction between actors.