When rights become expendable, culture bears the cost

When rights – A new issue from New Eastern Europe marks the legacy of Helsinki monitoring while warning of a slide toward might-is-right realpolitik—where rights are treated as optional. Across Belarus, Ukraine, and beyond, human rights are shown not as abstract ideals but

For decades. the first waves of Helsinki monitoring groups—formed in Moscow. Ukraine. and Lithuania—were built on a simple premise: how people are treated inside states is a matter of legitimate international interest. New Eastern Europe marks the 50th anniversary of those early initiatives with a new issue devoted to human rights. But in the introduction. its editors warn that the world appears to be moving into a new era where legal institutions and human rights are treated as dispensable—where securitization and national interest crowd out accountability.

That warning lands with particular force because the issue’s stories don’t stay inside the realm of policy debates. They move through family law and elections, through what women are told to value, and through what it means to cast a ballot when war has redrawn daily life.

Barbora Bukovská. senior director of law and policy at ARTICLE 19. argues the case plainly: human rights are a vital tool of accountability—perhaps more than ever. Writing from the perspective of those who have watched rights be sidelined in favor of business or security. she traces an echo of authoritarian rhetoric: a story that suggests rights still matter less when power tightens. She writes that when rights are increasingly subordinated, it resembles a world that has “already lost its moral nerve.”.

Bukovská points to decades in which the hypocrisy of international law and human rights enforcement has been tolerated. while deregulation and globalization deepen inequality and concentrate wealth. That pattern. she says. has been sharpened by the climate crisis. where “rights to water. health. housing and education are often ignored as political debates put economic growth or national interests before human needs.” Her insistence is both economic and personal: human rights must be recognized as a

check on abuses of power; economic and corporate power must be held to the same limitations created for states; and dignity has to be respected on the human level too. And she closes the thought with a warning that feels less like rhetoric and more like a clock: “If the last century has taught us anything. it is that when people get tired of defending rights. it does not take long before they start losing

them.”.

In Belarus, that question—what happens when rights are traded away—takes a cruelly concrete form. Tatsiana Astrouskaya. a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. describes how Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime instrumentalizes family policy by branding 2026 the “Year of the Belarusian Woman.” Under the banner of “traditional values. ” the state turns women into a political instrument.

Astrouskaya writes that since Lukashenka first came to power in 1994. family and social issues have been pillars of state policy. and the latest appeal reflects what she describes as the regime’s growing obsession with stimulating birth rates. With women forming a clear majority of the Belarusian population—53.8% in 2025—courting the female electorate has always been described as a logical move. Lukashenka has backed that approach with state benefits for large families. and even a state award for women who have given birth to and raised five or more children.

Yet Astrouskaya juxtaposes the pageantry of incentives with the texture of control. Welfare policy. she writes. “remains highly arbitrary and dependent on the president’s personal priorities and whims.” Meanwhile. sexist rhetoric. state-run beauty pageants. and the repeated blocking of a law on domestic violence tell a different story.

The issue’s account also ties the tightening around women to the aftermath of 2020 protests. widely described as a “revolution with a female face. ” in which women played major roles as participants and leaders. Astrouskaya says the regime’s increasingly repressive attitude towards women looks like a reaction to that mobilization—something cynical. designed to prevent history from repeating itself. The numbers of women who have since faced political persecution—including exile. imprisonment. and forced labour—are described as in excess of Stalinist levels.

She writes that burdening women—especially mothers—with endless responsibilities is meant to keep them out of the political arena. so they are less able to organize and resist. Her conclusion is blunt: “It is a calculated and deeply cynical mechanism designed to ensure that a moment like 2020 does not happen again.”.

The stakes shift again when the issue moves to Ukraine, where the question is not only whether rights are defended, but whether democracy is even possible while bullets keep answering ballots.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine moves deeper into its fifth year. debate about holding elections in Ukraine is intensifying even though constitutional barriers prohibit elections under martial law. Mariia Didkovska. project coordinator at the Kyiv-based Institute of American Studies. says the issue has been pushed into the spotlight by the US. She writes that the US is threatening to withhold security guarantees if presidential elections are not held in Ukraine. along with a referendum on a peace deal. At the same time, Didkovska says the Kremlin continues to exploit the postponement of elections in Ukraine for propaganda purposes.

Kyiv, Didkovska writes, says it is willing to make legal amendments to facilitate the process—but “legislation alone cannot guarantee feasibility.” She argues that what matters is a halt in hostilities. Zelensky has suggested a 60-day ceasefire. Moscow says it will only consider a pause of 24 hours.

Even if a pause could be agreed, Didkovska lays out the practical and political weight of what elections require. There are questions of freedom of movement, open information and campaigning, updating electoral data, and providing basic security conditions in and around polling stations.

Then come the categories that war has changed: how to organize voting for the millions of internally displaced citizens and refugees abroad. whose opportunity to vote “risks being constrained by limited voting infrastructure.” How to ensure members of the military have access to campaign information and can vote democratically. And for citizens in occupied territories. she asks what it would mean to vote under Russian occupation—pointing to the fact that “the war has reshaped the electorate geographically. administratively and socially. and the system will have to respond accordingly.”.

Didkovska suggests solutions, including digital innovation. But she also notes that elections are highly unusual where active combat is taking place. so international institutions such as the OSCE may be reticent to participate in observation missions. The dilemma she describes is stark: “Ukraine confronts a dilemma that few modern democracies have faced on this scale: how to protect the integrity of the ballot while defending the survival of the state itself.”.

Across these stories. the tension is the same even when the scenes differ: human rights are not merely a moral language. They are the mechanism people rely on when power tightens—whether that tightening targets women through “traditional values” and domestic violence laws being blocked. or whether it turns elections into an argument about ceasefires. security guarantees. and who counts as able to vote.

The issue’s framing keeps returning to a single question: when the world treats accountability as optional, who pays first?. In Belarus, the answer appears in persecution numbers described as surpassing Stalinist levels. In Ukraine, it appears in the difficulty of protecting ballot integrity while the state fights to survive. And in the background of both. the warning from Helsinki’s legacy feels newly urgent—because the moment people grow tired of defending rights. Bukovská suggests. the loss follows quickly.

human rights Helsinki monitoring groups New Eastern Europe ARTICLE 19 Belarus Lukashenka Year of the Belarusian Woman domestic violence law Ukraine elections Zelensky martial law OSCE Ukraine war women political persecution