Justinas Žilinskas. Human Rights in a Shrinking World

The late Aurelijus Katkevičius once said, near the end of Donald J. Trump’s first term, that this presidency was like a fire – after it, greener grass would grow; the United States would emerge stronger and purified, just as Lithuania did after Rolandas Paksas’s presidency. Sadly, the insightful Aurelijus was mistaken this time. Yet I still repeat his words like a mantra, something to steady myself when the world’s prospects look bleak. Many questions come to mind: how did we get here? Where was the tipping point – or have we not yet crossed it? Who failed to act, and what went undone? Why have human rights, once a unifying ideal, suddenly begun to divide us? Why have people turned away from them – and how did entire ideologies grow from that rejection? Of course, I don’t have the answers. No one truly does. Perhaps we thought too little about human rights, or failed to grasp their importance. Maybe generations have grown up unscarred by totalitarian horror and no longer recoil from extremist ideas. So my reflections are those of an amateur, still searching for answers. They will be fragmentary, because thoughts are unruly things – leaping, digressing, forming unlikely connections. I won’t write a legal treatise. Law usually follows society; sometimes it leads, for instance, when Lithuania abolished the death penalty despite public thirst for blood. But law is also a mirror of social processes. So here, I’m less concerned with what the law says – because, on paper, it says all the right things – and more with why people have stopped wanting to listen to it. But let me begin with a conversation.

Around 2010, while working in an international organization, I had colleagues from all over the world – among them, a Hungarian woman I had known through the International Committee of the Red Cross. We once had lunch together. At the time, people were already warning that Viktor Orbán’s populist “democracy” in Hungary might endure for a long time – that this was the beginning of a new trend. It still seemed hard to believe, and I asked her what she thought. She said, roughly, “I think it was the era of liberal elites. Now it’s someone else’s turn.” Her tone surprised me, as did her reluctance to judge that “other” elite. In time, I understood why. She now works in one of Hungary’s top state institutions and, as far as I can tell, sees no moral or other dilemmas in that. Once again, I felt naïve, realizing how easily people – even those trained in international and human rights law – can end up on the opposite side of the barricades. For a while I believed education and knowledge could change the world. Unfortunately, Lithuania, too, has its share of similar examples.

I recall another conversation, this one with a professor from St. Petersburg. He told me: “If the ‘Kaunas boys’ had been given economic freedom before 1990, no one would have fought for political independence.” I’m not sure he was right – I like to think better of my people. Still, I think back to that era – the final decade of the USSR – when our parents, and we their children, could live tolerably well, yet could not paint the Columns of Gediminas on a wall or raise the tricolor flag. And I ask myself: how many people truly felt then that they lacked human rights? The dream I remember most vividly was to “live better” – to live like one’s relatives, if one had any, in the West. Only dissidents – whom few knew personally – spoke of human rights. The wider public accepted that resistance led only to KGB cells. In my childhood, I probably never heard the words “human rights” at all – except in propaganda about how brutally they were being violated in the United States.

So for me, human rights have always carried a certain paradox. Most people care about them not in the abstract, but only when faced with a personal injustice, an abuse of power, or arbitrary treatment. Human rights are often called a new religion, bound up with individual liberalism and contrasted with collective visions of society or dismissed as a Western invention. Worse still, the very idea of universal human rights is sometimes portrayed as a colonial product – something imposed on other societies. Why, then, do those societies sign human-rights treaties? Because they’re forced to! Otherwise, they lose access to the privileges concentrated on the “human-rights” side of the global divide.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari – whose book, though not old, already feels a bit naïve in today’s changed world – describes human rights as a universal achievement. Even when challenged, he writes, it is not the concept that is disputed, but the scope and content of human rights. China, for example, does not reject the idea of human rights; it simply emphasizes economic rights over political ones (which, as we know, it lacks under the Communist Party’s “leading role”). Meanwhile, in the materially comfortable West we debate new generations of rights – the right to internet access, to biodiversity, even to a healthy climate. From the same root idea, we’ve extended the logic of rights to animals, and even to potential future synthetic or cybernetic beings.

For some, there are simply too many human rights. They see them as an obstacle to family, to the state, to its strength. Human rights are blamed for social permissiveness, moral decay, disobedient children. They’re even blamed for depleting resources: our “dignified life” standard, based on human-rights ideals, would require three Earths if extended to all. Human rights are a constant battlefield – and not everyone wins.

Thus, on the one hand, human rights can be viewed very narrowly and simply: as laws that establish norms and their interpretation in judicial practice; and on the other hand, very broadly – as a concept that has transformed the world and humanity’s place within it.

We all know that universal human rights are not ancient – particularly as an international construct. There were the Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and national constitutions enshrining certain rights. But can we really speak of a unified “age of human rights”? For us in Lithuania, it began only with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union – when we joined the so-called “golden billion.” For many others, the human-rights debate remains a theoretical luxury of the rich, not a lived reality. In Europe we can argue about the right to a healthy environment, about planes not flying overhead. But who in the developing world can relate? Conversely, there’s that (perhaps apocryphal) story of an American who, hearing how the Soviets deported Lithuanians to Siberia, asked: “Why didn’t you call your lawyer?” The gap in understanding between someone raised amid an abundance of rights and someone who has only heard of them is vast.

Maybe that’s why the new era of “Trumpism” feels so frightening. The aggressive neighbor to our east stands at the spearhead of human-rights denial, while our long-admired allies – those we’ve looked up to since 1945 – seem adrift.

Some might object: neither Trumpism nor Orbanism – nor even Putinism – is openly against human rights per se. Let them exist, say their defenders, but not in excess. They object not to rights themselves but to their “overextension”: to sexual rights (same-sex marriage, transgender rights), to the “dictatorship” of minorities – racial, ethnic, religious, etc. They say, “Fine, let human rights exist – we like them too, just not the new ones.” And they ask: human rights are about the individual – but what about the state, the community? Are their interests forgotten? Aren’t individuals abusing their rights?

It’s no secret that anything can be abused – including human rights. And abuses always draw more attention than the ordinary exercise of rights.

This brings us to the essential question too often missing from human-rights debates: the question of the minority – or, more precisely, the disempowered. Human rights are, at their core, about protecting those who need protection most. If you hold power or wealth – which you can convert into power – or belong to the dominant majority, human rights may feel irrelevant because you already have them. Historically, human rights arose not from abstract philosophy but from resistance to arbitrary power: first against kings in medieval Europe who refused to share authority with nobles, townsmen, and later, the “third estate.” When monarchs disappeared, the struggle was between the state and the individual – and later, between stronger and weaker groups: men and women, adults and children, majorities and minorities. Human rights, however noble, always emerge from conflict.

They are also inconvenient – they demand effort, action. And, ironically, they can also become tools of hypocrisy. Students of history will recall that the so-called Opium Wars, when Britain forced China to submit, began with the “rights” of British traders imprisoned for smuggling opium. Did those merchants care about the rights of the Chinese people to whom they sold the drug? Hardly. Modern parallels are not hard to find – for example, migration. Wealthy societies are reluctant to share their prosperity with newcomers; there simply isn’t enough “good” to go around. In the United States, mass deportation campaigns now openly proclaim – even in pop lyrics – that “human rights are for Americans,” meaning U.S. citizens only.

Listening to the chorus of opinions, you get the sense that many people today can hardly imagine a world without human rights – a world where only the strong, only the majority, matter. To them, I’d suggest a thought experiment. Do you think you belong to that majority? Test it in a country known for violating human rights. Are you a woman? You have no rights. A child? No rights. An ethnic, racial, religious, or national minority? No rights. A sexual minority? No rights. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 shows how quickly rights can vanish – and for how long. Putinism in Russia shows the same.

In Lithuania, we live in a strange time. Human rights were at least formally central to our political agenda until we joined the European Union – more than twenty years ago – but since then we have drifted. How many tragedies did it take to finally reform the child-protection system? The Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women remains stalled, buried under imaginary fears. Same-sex partnership is still unresolved. Even after the Constitutional Court gave the green light, new parliamentary initiatives have already emerged to block it again.

And of course, there is the specter of LGBT rights – dismissed in vulgar discourse with the phrase “let them do what they want at home, but not in public.” Here lies another paradox: LGBT people are often colorful, loud, and unwilling to blend in. They are a minority, yet precisely because of their visibility, they stand out – and crowds dislike that. Part of this, perhaps, stems from the Soviet experience, which tolerated no brightness – not in architecture, art, or life. It also suppressed sexuality, locking it away behind the façade of propriety or vulgar jokes. Recall Orwell’s 1984, where Winston’s wife regards sex only as “a duty to the Party.” The greatest paradox, however, is that even those who suffered under Soviet repression now claim that the regime “protected us from Western degeneracy” – meaning, above all, LGBT+ rights.

At the same time, the prominence of LGBT+ rights can have an unintended effect: sharp polemics on this issue, amplified by the media, often overshadow other pressing human-rights concerns – such as the rights of people with disabilities or mental illness.

Take, for example, a widely publicized case in Lithuania where police officers shot and killed a woman with a mental disorder whom they could not subdue. Public discussion – especially online – focused almost entirely on the officers’ right to self-defense. Few defended the woman’s rights, even her most basic right: the right to life. Instead, people repeated statements like, “You have no idea what a mentally ill person can do.”

Another painful example is the instrumentalized migration crisis. Most migrants trying to cross illegally from Belarus into Lithuania are third-country nationals who are turned back and trapped in limbo, though the European Court of Human Rights has ruled such practices a violation. The issue is complex. Many are economic migrants for whom Lithuania is merely a gateway to the EU. Still, their fate in the border zone often stands in stark conflict with basic principles of humanity. Lithuania faces an impossible dilemma: it must defend its border, while Belarus uses migration as a tool of hybrid warfare. The situation leaves Lithuania in a kind of no-win trap – letting migrants in seems impossible, but pushing them back is a violation, and for some it means death. Public discourse focuses almost exclusively on migrants as a “threat,” ignoring that among them are genuine asylum seekers. Organizations that help them are demonized. Any balance in the conversation is lost.

I also sense a broader disillusionment – the sense that human rights are just lofty words on paper. Watching Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, reading reports of tortured prisoners, bombed cities, and destroyed infrastructure, despair is understandable: what human rights? Who still cares? The Israeli–Hamas war after October 7, 2024 raises similar questions. Can a state, even when responding to a brutal attack, justify civilian deaths on such a scale? Can it block humanitarian aid or target rescue workers? Once again, society splits into opposing camps: opponents of Israel (for reasons that are not entirely clear) view the war started by Hamas as Palestine’s fight for freedom, while Israel’s supporters tend to dismiss all talk of Israeli violations.

Sadly, this “us versus them” mindset seeps even into the field of human rights itself. Narratives are dominated by loud extremists who quickly gather followers, while genuine dialogue collapses before it begins. In public discourse, only a few still attempt nuanced, multi-layered discussion.

In such a toxic climate, the question “Where are human rights?” is hard to answer – and the answer itself is not simple. My only reply is this: we know that certain acts are violations of human rights, and they must not be tolerated. Because without the very concept of human rights, we wouldn’t even be able to ask the question. It’s small comfort, I know, to those who suffer or die.

Still, skepticism – especially the normalization of rights violations – is another nail in the coffin of the idea itself. As long as we recognize that these rights exist, that they must exist, that they must be defended – and that their violation doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to exist but simply that they’ve been breached – there remains hope of restoring them, even of holding violators accountable. But if we begin to claim that such violations are normal, that we no longer need what “doesn’t work,” we will be making a terrible mistake.

I titled this essay with a linguistic play on words: a shrinking world [translator note: trumpėjantis in Lithuanian means both shrinking and becoming “Trump-like”]. The title refers not only to Trump but also to something broader – the way, as studies and our own experience show, our attention spans are shrinking, our patience waning, our grasp of complexity diminishing. From its very beginning, the Open Lithuania Foundation sought polylogue: to bring freer, more diverse conversation – one capable of healing the traumas and memory wounds of the Soviet era. That kind of speech is essential for any meaningful discourse on human rights. If we can remember this, if we resist turning human rights into mere fodder for culture wars, if we keep talking about them and honoring them in our everyday lives, perhaps we will not repeat the darkest pages of the second half of the 20th century.