Reliquary: The Helsinki Process

As Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform notes in a recent paper, “Western governments and dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union used its human rights commitments as standards to which they could hold communist regimes accountable, putting them on the defensive and gradually increasing the pressure on them to take steps to implement what they had signed up to. Mikhail Gorbachev could argue that his reforms merely implemented principles that the Soviet Union had already signed up to.”