A number of scholars have argued that dissident human rights movements in the Soviet Union's republics influenced a series of political and social changes that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union (Thomas 2001; Snyder 2011; Morgan 2018). This paper seeks to explore the role of the Ukrainian human rights movement in popularising human rights and translating everyday injustice into human rights terms. By examining documents produced by early Ukrainian human rights activists, I identify the main trends and ideas voiced by members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and their allies. Moreover, I demonstrate how Ukrainian dissidents managed to establish a network of organisations capable of continuing information coverage on human rights violations when the core group was hit by Soviet repressions. This contextual approach, combined with historical retrospective, allows us to understand how the early Ukrainian human rights activists mobilised around human rights ideas and laid the foundation for the further development of human rights institutions in the country after the fall of communism.