Editor's Note:

Democracy's values and virtues are often debated. Rein Mullerson (Mullerson), former advisor of international law for Soviet Union top leader Mikhail Gorbachev and president of the Academy of Law of Tallinn University, Estonia, shifted his views on democracy in the last decade. Mullerson answered questions in a recent forum hosted by the China Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai.  

Rein Mullerson Photo: Courtesy of China Institute

Q: You once said that governance, rather than democracy, should be regarded as a more universal criterion for ranking states. Why is that?

Mullerson: I started writing a book on democracy in 2007 (Democracy - A Destiny of Humankind?). Before that I worked for the UN regional advisor in central Asia, and my practice there and my work on the book changed my views on democracy quite radically.

People should be ready to change their views on even more important issues. If you start researching topics and you already believe that democracy is the best thing, it is for everybody, and it is a universal value, then there is nothing to study. You have made up your mind already. And it is, logically, a very difficult problem.

Of course, if you start studying something, you have already known something about it.

But it also means you are biased in your research. It is a difficult dilemma for any researchers in field of social sciences.

I came to the conclusion finally that, yes, democracy is a value, but there are different forms of democracy. In the West, liberal democracy is about several things, and mostly the vote - regular, free election. And this is a big problem.

Also, money. In some countries, let's say Russia, you need to have political power to have money. In the West, you need money in order to have political power. So this is a reverse form of corruption, in my opinion, especially in the US.

Probably Donald Trump is the most honest candidate because he spends his own money. If he wins the election, he is nobody's man.

I believe societies have to be ready for democracy. One of my conclusions about democracy is that before democracy, there should be the rule of law, and economic development as well.

In the UK, rule of law developed centuries before democracy. Before the 19th century, after political reform in the UK, only less than 2 percent of the population were able to vote.

Now you have democracy  in Pakistan, in Iraq. One man one vote. But you don't have rule of law.

If you introduce formal elections to a country where there is minimal condition for democracy back in home, you have chaos. Kazakhstan is not a democracy in my opinion, but it is better ruled, and I believe it is more important if a country is better ruled than it is a democracy or not.

Q: You were once a member of the UN's Human Rights Committee, how do you view the West's criticism on China's human rights?

Mullerson: There are basic rights that I think are universal, but I don't think that all human rights are universal, certainly. There is a debate going on in Estonia about whether same-sex marriage is a universal human right or not.

I would say that if all human rights are universal and always universal, then they would evolve and develop.

Human rights are not like the rules of nature, which happen to be discovered by somebody and explained to people, as what Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton did in physics. Human rights are social constructs and they depend on societies and now they depend on the vote.

I am reading a book at the moment that says there is no such thing as an international community.

My opinion is that on the one hand, the human rights movement has gone too far sometimes, and that is not a good thing for human rights.

The Human Rights Committee for the UN should concentrate on such things like war crime, genocide, and mass violations of human rights.

Q: I once heard a famous politician remarking that Russian President Vladimir Putin brought demodernization to Russia. Now we see Russia in crisis. Why does it now have this problem? Is it system, policy, or because of what happened in the 1990s?

Mullerson: There are many reasons. One is the problem, stemming especially from the Yeltsin period, of corruption.

It is not as bad as Ukraine, I would say. Ukraine was much more corrupt, I spoke to a businessman who said that "When you do business in Russia, you pay bribes sometimes, while in Ukraine you pay bribes all the time, there is no exception."

Therefore I don't see that those critics of Putin are right, and this is their problem - they criticize everything. In Russia there is a term that means "criticism across the board."

The problem is with the oil and gas money, Russia has not reformed its economy.

Putin understands it, I am sure, but how to deal with it? Where can we find in society forces who are not corrupt, and rely on them in order to carry out reforms?

You may say Russia needs democratic openness completely, as Gorbachev did in the end of the 1980s. If now Putin decides to open the country and have full democracy and freedom of speech, which I don't believe will happen, who will come then? CNN. Fox News.

It is not about the interest of Russia or the interests of the people of Russia as it was then.

In the foreign policy field, I understand Putin, and I may even agree with most of his steps. I don't think there is much wrong with Russia's foreign policy, and the reason is that Russia is defensive.

Global Times Shanghai-based reporter Liao Fangzhou contributed to the story