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61 Japanese Y.B. Int'l L. 260 (2018)
The Controversy over Human Rights, UN Covenants, and the Dissolution of the Soviet Union

handle is hein.journals/jpyintl61 and id is 274 raw text is: 260 HALF A CENTURY WITH THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANTS ON HUMAN RIGHTS: LONG-TERM IMPACTS ON THE WORLD, ASIA AND JAPAN: PART THREE THE CONTROVERSY OVER HUMAN RIGHTS, UN COVENANTS, AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION Lauri Mdlksoo* Introduction I. The Official Soviet Concept of Human Rights Before Perestroika II. Debates About the (Non-)Implementation of the ICCPR in the USSR III. Changes in Human Rights Discourse During the Perestroika Era IV. Epilogue: Human Rights After 1991 Introduction Looking back at the period of more than fifty years since the signing of two human rights covenants at the UN in 1966, we can see that probably the most sig- nificant event of a world historical scale that happened was the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Historians will continue to discuss and debate the complex reasons that led to the collapse of the Communist superpower. Different factors arguably played a role: the drop in price of oil in 1986, the arms race accelerated by U.S. President Reagan, the strong pro-independence movements in the Baltic States and Georgia, the personalities and decisions of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the failed coup d'6tat of Soviet hard-liners in August 1991, etc. However, one lesson that we can also learn from the final phase of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR is that ideas are of paramount importance. The USSR would hardly have collapsed from any pressure, internal or external, if its ideological immune system had been functioning well in 1991. In this paper, my main argument is that the debate about the role of human rights played an im- portant role in the dissolution of the USSR and in the birth of the new, post-Soviet world in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. As an international human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) did not become the main battle cry of the forces promoting the reform or disintegration of the USSR in * Professor of International Law, the University of Tartu, Estonia. Support for the research and writing of this article, in the form of a grant from the Estonian Research Council (IUT20-50) and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is gratefully acknowledged. Japanese Yearbook of International Law Vol. 61 (2018), pp. 260-283

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