From Rights to Traditions: The Declarative Nature of Human Rights in Russian State Policy
The most telling indication of the direction of both the decree and the policy of the Russian elite is that in Decree No. 809 of 9 November 2022 ‘On the Approval of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values’, human rights are mentioned only once.
This mention is contained in paragraph 5, which lists the so-called ‘traditional values’. It is noteworthy that human rights are formally included in the list alongside ‘life, dignity, rights and freedoms of the individual’, but this mention is purely declarative and ritualistic in nature – evidence of formal adherence to international rhetoric without any substantive content.
The remaining 32 paragraphs of the document focus on a fundamentally different agenda: ‘combating destructive ideology’, ‘protecting against external influence’, supporting ‘traditional family values’ (with an emphasis on marriage as a union between a man and a woman), countering ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ and other ‘threats to traditional values’. It is telling that after a formal mention, human rights are not further developed anywhere in the document as a concept requiring protection or mechanisms for implementation.
A structural analysis of the document reveals a clear hierarchy in which human rights as a universal concept are deliberately subordinated to and effectively absorbed by particular ‘traditional values’, This is not simply a shift in emphasis, but a fundamental change in the ontological status of human rights in official Russian doctrine. While in the liberal understanding of law, human rights are primary, inalienable and universal, in the logic of Decree No. 809, they become derivative of the cultural and historical context, limited by ‘tradition’ and national specificity.
The document operates with a binary logic of ‘us and them,’ where human rights in their universal understanding are effectively labelled as part of a ‘foreign’, ‘Western’, ‘destructive’ ideological influence. Paragraphs 15-20 of the Decree clearly position ‘traditional values’ in opposition to ‘so-called universal human values’, creating a discursive framework in which the universality of human rights is perceived as a threat to Russian identity.
It is critically important not only that human rights are mentioned formally, but also that there is a complete absence of any mechanisms for their protection, monitoring or implementation. Let us compare: in the same paragraphs concerning the ‘protection of traditional values’, institutional mechanisms are spelled out in detail (the creation of interdepartmental commissions, the role of ‘traditional religious organisations’, educational programmes, media policy). Human rights, on the other hand, remain an empty signifier without institutional content.
This asymmetry is methodologically significant. It shows that references to human rights serve exclusively legitimisation purposes – for external audiences and formal compliance with international obligations. However, real state policy is built around a fundamentally different value matrix, where individual rights are subordinated to collective ‘traditions’, state security, and ideological homogeneity.
Decree No. 809 marks the end of an evolutionary process that has lasted for the last two decades. While in the early 2000s, the Russian authorities still resorted to imitation practices of creating ‘controlled’ human rights institutions, after 2012 (the law on ‘foreign agents’) a phase of active delegitimisation of human rights discourse began. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the adoption of Decree No. 809 mark a new stage – the open construction of an alternative value system, where human rights are either absent altogether or present as a subordinate, marginal element.
This is confirmed by law enforcement practices. Since February 2022, we have witnessed an unprecedented wave of repression against any form of dissent, the criminalisation of anti-war positions (articles on ‘discrediting’ and ‘fakes’ about the army), and the effective elimination of independent civil society. The courts systematically refuse to protect constitutional rights, appealing to the ‘special period’, ‘national security’ and, increasingly, ‘traditional values’ as arguments that outweigh individual rights.
Decree No. 809 marks a fundamental break with the legal understanding of the state that has developed in the European tradition since the Second World War.
While modern liberal democracy is constituted through the recognition of the inviolability of human rights as the limits of state power, the Russian model articulated in this document offers an alternative formula for legitimacy: the state is legitimate not through the protection of individual rights, but through the preservation of collective identity, formulated in terms of ‘traditional values’.
This is a return to a pre-modern type of political organisation, where loyalty prevails over law, and identity over freedom. It is telling that even the rhetoric of the document lacks any mention of autonomy, choice or individual freedom – instead, it is dominated by vocabulary related to protection, preservation and resistance to external threats. The subject of such a policy is not a free individual with rights, but a member of a collective whose identity is determined by their belonging to ‘tradition’.
Thus, Decree No. 809 is not just another regulatory document, but a programmatic statement about a fundamental change in the value foundations of Russian statehood. The formal, one-time mention of human rights against the backdrop of 32 paragraphs on the fight against ‘destructive ideology’ eloquently testifies that the Russian elites have made a conscious choice in favour of a model of the state where human rights in their universal understanding have no place. This is not a departure from human rights, but their systematic replacement with an alternative ideological construct that legitimises unlimited power by appealing to ‘tradition’ and collective identity.
