FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MINORITY RIGHTS PROTECTION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract

The article focuses on the evolutionary development of international legal regulation in the field of protection of the national minority rights from the Westphalian system of international relations to the present. The aspiration of non-dominant groups to preserve their cultural, religious, or ethnic background was manifested simultaneously with the emergence of nation-states in the seventeenth century. However, since then, the international community has not reached a consensus on the content of the concept of minority: a unified approach to the issue has not been elaborated in either international legal acts, law doctrine, or judicial practice. At the universal level, the protection of minority rights in international law was institutionalized only during the functioning of the League of Nations. The established procedures for the implementation and control over the observance of minority rights within the League of Nations were elaborated in sufficient detail and provided for effective collective security measures to resolve international disputes and problems arising in connection with the protection of minority rights. Indeed, this system also had a number of significant shortcomings that were subsequently taken into account when establishing mechanisms for the protection of minority rights within the United Nations. In reviewing international legal acts after 1945, the following general tendency should be emphasized. It concerns the adoption of a large array of documents in this field, most of which are advisory and general in nature. This is explained by the fact that minority issues are a sensitive area of public relations, and states are reluctant to make this sphere regulated by international law. The Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995) became the first legally binding legislative act on the protection of minorities in general, and this fact makes it fundamentally important. The absence of the norms directly aimed at the protection of national minorities in the catalog of rights guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) cannot but affects the efficient application of the mechanism of the European Court by national minorities. However, the link between human rights violations and minority rights allows the latter to fight for the restoration of individual human rights protected by the European Convention, which undoubtedly plays a positive role in the context of the protection of collective minority rights. Keywords: national minorities, periodization, universal system for the protection of human rights, Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, ECHR.