> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:

In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?

The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.

But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.

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nickff 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I can definitely imagine the Soviet Union making arbitrary rules about which genocides were recognized and ‘protected’, and which were not.

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skissane 6 hours ago | parent [-]

But can you imagine a Soviet court declaring a law to be in violation of human rights?

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nickff 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, much like the EU, they would regularly over-ride the ‘opinions’ of their subordinate states.

	▲	skissane 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The central party and state organs in Moscow would sometimes overrule decisions by the governments of the SSRs and other subordinate entities. But they didn't do this by having the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union declare laws unconstitutional. They did it by administrative fiat.