Rights in the age of the new autocracy
If we only focus on the limits of human rights, we tend to overlook their deeper function in the resilience of democracy. While enforcement can fall short, the existence of powerful legal standards still influences political contestation and slows down the process of institutional erosion, even in the age of new authoritarianism.
April 21, 2026 -
Zuzana Pavlíčková
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Hot TopicsIssue 3 2026Magazine
Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba
Are human rights a romantic concept of liberal democracies that have ultimately proved insufficient for saving them from the return of authoritarian governance? The experience of Central and Eastern Europe suggests something more complex. It shows us that although human rights are not the silver bullet against democratic backsliding, they are one of the most important legal tools in the toolkit of democratic resilience.
Modern autocrats play their game by using democratic institutions to unbalance free political competition and seize power by combining nationalist, anti-liberal, and populist agendas, often adding a picture of a dominant leader into the recipe. What mostly puts the effectiveness of human rights mechanisms to the test under their rule is that the destruction of the rule of law and democracy is not happening in the classical coercive way but actually through the law and its selective interpretation. Thus, the rule of law is replaced by the rule by law.
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Authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, illiberalism
