If the defence of human rights is truly to be seen as universal, it is essential to examine whether and how these rights can still be protected even in spaces that fall at the margins of the international system. This includes examining the human rights situation in and around some of Europe’s most contested but least well known places – Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Crimea – which are the subject of new research by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the Foreign Policy Centre.
These unresolved conflicts were born when the patchwork of ethnicities and territories that existed during the Soviet era swiftly unravelled following the Soviet Union’s collapse, amid the re-emergence of national identities and competing attempts to consolidate power and legitimacy. Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from the control of Moldova, Azerbaijan and Georgia respectively in the early 1990s, with the 2008 Georgian-Russian war further consolidating the situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Crimea was occupied and subsequently annexed in the more recent 2014 Russian invasion.
Recent years have seen deterioration of the already challenging human rights situation in South Ossetia, and a more gradual but still noticeable decline in the traditionally freer civic space in Abkhazia. In Nagorno-Karabakh the closing of civic space that had previously been underway seems to have reversed over the last year as a knock-on effect of the Velvet Revolution in Armenia. Transnistria remains restrictive but stable, while the situation in post-annexation Crimea has deteriorated significantly, especially for those who oppose the Russian takeover.
