ABSTRACT
Prince Alexander Gorchakov, the Foreign Minister or Chancellor of the Russian Empire, wrote in his circular of 1864 on the foreign policy of Russia in Central Asia. Human rights and democracy in Central Asia have been issues of bilateral diplomacy of Western countries as well as of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the organization on security and cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Martens argued, and this was the prevalent view at the time, that international law, which was then often called international law of civilized nations does not and cannot govern relations between all the peoples of the world. The world has always been divided into societies with hugely different social and political structures, economic systems and levels of societal development whose external behaviour, as Martens emphasized on more than one occasion, is determined to a significant extent by these internal structures and politics.
