Combining the Incompatible : professor Petro Nedbailo and human rights

The article analyses the scientific and diplomatic activities of Professor Petro Nedbailo. At the end of 1939, as part of the policy of “strengthening personnel” after the accession of Western Ukraine to the Ukrainian SSR, he was sent to work at the Lviv University. Since then, Petro Nedbailo headed the departments of state law, theory and history of state as well as law, state and administrative law, and he was twice appointed the dean of the law faculty. Initially, the scientist studied the issues of “socialist legitimacy”, but after being appointed the permanent representative of the Ukrainian SSR to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1958-1971) and the transition to teaching at the University of Kyiv, he paid more attention to human rights and freedoms. Repeating the Soviet official position, Petro Nedbailo interpreted human rights as a subject of internal competence of the state, and accepted international cooperation in this area only as a component of the “struggle for peace and security of the Soviet Union”. In his speeches in the UN General Assembly, Petro Nedbailo argued about the full respect for human rights in the Ukrainian SSR, but such allegations were far from the truth.