Minority rights in international law

Abstract

Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located? Answers to this question typically rest on a commitment to the protection of certain universal attributes of human identity from the exercise of sovereign power. Minority protection thus operates on the assumption that religious, cultural, and linguistic affi liations are essential features of what it means to be human. This essay offers an alternative account of why minority rights possess international signifi cance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture, and language and more on the value of international distributive justice. On this approach, international minority rights speak to wrongs that international law itself produces by organizing international political reality into a legal order. This account avoids the normative instabilities of attaching universal value to religious, cultural, and linguistic affi liation and, instead, challenges the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making. 1. In a kaleidoscopic redistribution of sovereign power after the First World War, the once-great Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, its territory divided, partitioned, and reallocated to friends and enemies alike. France received mandates from the League of Nations to govern Syria and Lebanon. The United Kingdom received mandates to govern Iraq, Palestine, and what eventually became Israel and Jordan. Turkish nationals repelled Allied forces occupying their country and established the Republic of Turkey, while huge swaths of the Arabian Peninsula became parts of modern-day Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The instruments that invested these political developments with international legal validity dramatically reshaped the structure of the international legal order. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, for example, delineated the territorial sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey, replacing the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which had been negotiated but not ratifi ed by the Ottoman Parliament. In doing so, the Treaty of Lausanne restored Turkey’s previous boundary with Bulgaria and Western Thrace, annulled the transfer of Smyrna to Greece, and relieved Turkey of postwar obligations to compensate Allied civilian nationals for wartime losses. The treaty also provided for extensive population exchanges between Turkey and Greece and repudiated Turkey’s