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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Would it therefore be legal to implement a Russian visa ban, as the European Union is currently considering doing?
OK, let's look at the horse's mouth.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
And a simplified explanation of it:
Article 13
You have the right to freedom of movement within your country. Everyone has the right to leave a country and to return home.
So...
First part. Yes, unlike some countries with internal passport systems, Russia does allow its citizens to travel and settle internally.
Second part. Also met. Unlike East Germany and North Korea. Russia allows people to emigrate. No barbed wire and minefields. Plenty of Russians have left.
A previous answer of yours even says so:
there are no exit visas, so you can leave the country as long as you have no debts, and you don't work at secret military service
I believe that, so far, they are being allowed back in, by Russia. Not doing so would be an exile situation, which is not happening. So, Russia, is not violating article 13, we'll agree.
Obligations of other countries to provide travel visas for pleasure and business? Don't see them.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Accepting Russian who are leaving for good is happening. Not sure if Russia, yet, can be broadly accused of persecuting its own people and thus qualify for broad spectrum "justified claims of risk". If Russia's government wants to argue that its behavior, towards Russians, put it in the category of unsafe countries, maybe it could do so.
But, needless to remind you, article 14 is not concerned about travel visas, as listed in the question. It is acceptance as refugees.
To quote your linked article:
To protect national security and the integrity of EU sanctions, the bloc must impose a travel ban on tourism on Russian citizens until Moscow ends its invasion of Ukraine, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told EURACTIV.
Yes
Entering the country other than the own is the privilege, not the right. Discrimination by the citizenship when granting this right is not racism. Lots of illegal migrants are returned where they came from all the time. It would be illegal to allow White to enter while denying Black with the same passport, but as long as there are no exceptions of this kind, it is fine.
The right to leave means the right to leave away over the border of the country. If another county behind the border does not allow to continue the path, this is not seen as a violation of human rights. Or, if it can be proved to be a violation due some legal twists I am not aware of, it is so extremely common that nobody will care.
That it is legal to do, does not mean it should be done.
Or do you want to say that as long as Russian tourist can visit at least China - it's ok?
Even if every other country denied entry, it would be ok. The right to leave is only relative to the country being left. Russia can't prevent its citizens (nor anyone else) from leaving Russia (with exceptions for crime and so on).
If every other country refuses to accept the person, it's still possible to go sailing in international waters, for example. But even if it weren't, no other country would have to take on itself the responsibility of preserving the person's right to leave Russia.
TL;DR:
Too many trolls making disingenuous or specious comments below.
The question originally asked about an EU tourism visa ban, and asks if some kind of global (as in all-comprising) visa ban is compliant or not with the UNDHR or UDHR, however you want to refer to it. It is the UN's declaration, not that of any other organisation - and it is just an organisation's policy that countries choose to accord with or not. Call it what you want, we all know what we're talking about. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
It doesn't cover "tourist visas", or visa bans, so the question is not directly applicable.
As has recently been demonstrated, decisions on visa policy rest with governments of countries, not the EU. Organisations like the UN, through parts of it, like the SC, can, through treaty, exert pressure on countries to comply with things like sanctions and visa bans, but ultimately countries decide, and usually they are applied to invdividuals. If proposed targets of visa bans and sanctions are security council members with veto, it all starts to look more like theatre than anything practicable, as is also demonstrated by recent events.
Despite the fact that the organisations like the EU and UN can't issue visa bans, the concepts in the UNDHR are about the rights of freedom to leave and enter countries. By definition, unless you only travel by sea, leaving any country implies that you enter another one. If you live in a land-locked country and you are trying to argue that you can leave your country, without entering another one, perhaps you have a space rocket or a mining machine to travel through the earth, but in most cases, leaving one jurisdiction means entering another. Anyone arguing to the contrary is possibly being disingenuously pedantic.
The "spirit" of a law, its its inferred intention. In the case of human rights axioms, the inferred intention is pretty self-evident: that people are not treated as a category and suffer penalties for things they didn't do.
In a very practical sense, there are perhaps a million Russian citizens holidaying, working, or living in the EU right now, and many will be dual nationals. The impracticability of a visa ban is multifaceted, and the infraction of human rights of such people is self-evident. There are likely to be some cases, for example with dual nationals resident in the EU with families, for whom a visa ban would certainly be in conflict with human rights principles expressed in the UNHDR/UHDR.
EU rules appear to be irrelevant on this topic, as some countries do not support the precedent of national visa-bans in peacetime.
