Ok, lets put it in a way you might understand.

Let's say there's a basic human right to life, liberty and security (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). That's quite basic.

You say you live in Russia. What good does that right do if your holy leader decides that he doesn't like what you posted online and sends you to the front in Ukraine or into a Gulag? Are you going to tell the military police that they can't touch you because you got rights?

Or lets make it more extreme: Say you live in Gaza. Are you going to tell the IDF that you got rights and thus their bombs and starvation just won't touch you?

You are likely from one of the countries with English-derived legal system, where the precedent mechanism literally means that there are non-codified rights outside of the law, which the interpretation of the law has to approximate.

Nope, I don't live in a country with English-derived legal system. A law is a law and judges interpret laws and not judges.

But even in a precedent-based system: Precedent means jack squat if the country's leadership doesn't care, as seen by the US.

I say it once again: Rights, laws, constitutions, all that are fine and dandy, and they are somewhat useful as long as the rule of law is mostly upheld. But:

• If the leadership doesn't care about any of that, none of it matters.
• If laws stop being enforced, they stop mattering. A law that isn't enforced is a suggestion, nothing more.
• The same goes for constitutions and constitution-adjacent rules.
• Rights are never anything more than suggestions. If they are supposed to have any meaning at all, they need to be codified into law.

Look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All 193 member countries of the UN ratified these. And yet there are articles in there that every single of these member countries violate. And having these "rights" means absolutely nothing in real-life terms if there's no mechanism to enforce them or get any benefit from it.

As a russian, how much do you e.g. enjoy the "right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association" (Article 20.1) and the "right to freedom of opinion and expression" (Article 19)? How much does "having these rights" help you if you go on the street and protest the war?