Minority Rights in International Law

Abstract

The twentieth century has seen a cyclical resurgence of the issue of minority rights. The first international regime of minority protection was put into place following World War I within the framework of the League of Nations. The League system is widely credited both for acknowledging that minority rights exist and for legitimizing minority protection as an area of international concern. Its main failing, however, was that it never became universal, thus leading to discontinuity with the human rights system established after the Second World War. The mid-twentieth century inaugurated the era of individual human rights. While some progress was made over the ensuing decades in defining minority rights, the legal framework for responding to crises involving minorities did not become sophisticated enough. Since the end of the Cold War and the crises in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the importance of minority rights has once again been forcefully demonstrated in the international arena. This article will attempt to outline the existing international framework and some of the key issues that are still being debated. It is submitted, however, that normative efforts at regulating minority rights cannot and will not be successful as long as an underlying policy