In 1996, the Russian Federation became a member of the Council of Europe. Two years later, the Russian parliament ratified the Council’s major document—the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
These papers were presented at a conference at Yekaterinburg in spring 2001. The collection constitutes a snapshot of Russian and Western approaches to human rights protection at a moment when Russia was going through a first phase of adaptation of the political system created by Boris Yeltsin to the new modes of state-society relations being introduced by Vladimir Putin.