ABSTRACT
This chapter asks whether the discourse and practice of human rights can be transplanted from one part of the world to another – indeed from one culture to another.
Russia is a relatively recent addition to the European Convention system for the protection of human rights. Its membership of the Council of Europe since 1996 represents a supreme irony of history, given the origins of the Council in the Cold War, and the question of its admission was highly controversial, both in Russia and Strasbourg. There are those who continue to warn that the world’s most successful human rights protection mechanism could be undermined.1
