Authors

Agnieszka Kubal¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

This paper maps the human rights movement in Poland during the 1970s and 1980s, which was a multifaceted endeavour, combining clandestine organizations (the Helsinki Commission operating within the Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR), Helsinki Committee) and public actors (Office of the First Ombudswoman), legal professionals (local Bar Councils), and a firm grounding in international law. These actors in their reports and publications translated everyday abuses and grievances into human rights language, and therefore filled human rights - ‘a global moral language of our time’ – with concrete meaning and substantive content. They also created an infrastructure of knowledge about human rights; while initially, this infrastructure was limited was a small group of specialist lawyers and legal professionals, through the smuggling of these publications to ‘the West’, the transnational Helsinki network and the Radio Free Europe (RFE) broadcasts the knowledge and broader consciousness of these violations became much more widespread.