Russians' Rights Imperiled: Has Anybody Noticed?

In theory, the degree to which states comply with international norms not only testifies to the robustness of those norms but also indicates how central they are to what is commonly (and euphemistically) referred to as the “international community.” Recent scholarship has shifted from establishing that norms, particularly those related to human rights, matter in international relations to specifying the mechanisms by which norms diffuse throughout this community and inside states. A growing body of literature argues that the international human rights regime, like the “process of global democratization,” is “increasing in strength and robustness.” At the start of the twenty-first century, human rights norms appear to be more widespread in Europe than they were twentyseven years ago at the dawn of the Helsinki process, and shared more widely than fifty-four years ago during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.