Human rights meant a universal recognition of equal human dignity. Once that idea was formally incorporated as law, it became an argument for the legal autonomy of a citizen of an actual communist state. Communist regimes treated law as subordinate to the party, as the written emanation of the power relations of a given moment. But law could also be understood differently, as an aperture to a world of values, in which normal meant “following moral standards” rather than “accepting normalization.” Courageous people in the USSR and throughout eastern Europe decided, in this spirit, to take their
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