Minority Rights in Ukraine After the Maidan Revolution: Change or Continuity?

Since a proper understanding of the respective claims and sensitivities of Russians and Ukrainians, also towards the terms of a possible peace agreement, requires a certain awareness of the Soviet Union’s ambiguous approach towards the different ethnic groups in that multi-ethnic state, the article starts with a succinct account of the history of the Soviet Union and its demise. The ‘legal’ status quo, more particularly legal standards and practice concerning minority rights and language rights in both Ukraine and Russia, is also covered. The second sub-chapter will then provide an overview of the international legal framework regarding minority (language) rights, starting from the overarching principles, over the main legally binding standards to soft law standards. Thirdly, a brief overall evaluation of the status quo in Ukraine and Russia regarding minority(language) rights in terms of the international legal framework, allows to identify parameters that can be used during the peace negotiations, more particularly benchmarks about what can be reasonably expected from the respective governments. The latter may be particularly useful in relation to some of the claims of the Russian government. The fourth sub-chapter delves into the most sensitive matter of minority language rights in Ukraine, and particularly the position and rights of the Russian minority, while also briefly sketching the situation of minority language rights in Russia. By way of conclusion, recommendations for the peace negotiations are offered, which build on the guiding principle of a proportionate balance between the wish to promote the national language on the one hand and a suitable (proportionate) protection of languages of minorities (with neighboring kin-states) on the other.

This chapter considers the conflicts which arise at the intersection of the free exercise of religion and sexual minority rights in the domains of work and non-work activities. Specifically, by examining the key features of various discrimination cases from the US and UK contexts, the chapter identifies the possible tensions between different minority groups and the negotiation and settlement of their respective interests and entitlements. In an effort to reconcile the seemingly competing claims made for equality, the chapter considers a theoretical middle range within which the existing debates may be addressed through the careful application of Isaiah Berlin’s theory of positive and negative freedoms in public life. The use of Berlin’s theory contributes to the analysis of the justice standing of religious and sexual minority groups, what protections minority groups in conflict must be accorded vis-à-vis each other, and the nature of remedies which should be accorded to each group in theory and practice.

It is often assumed that, in Western societies, Christian values are embedded in national identities, yet, the association between religious identities and prejudice has seldom been studied in parallel to national identity. According to both the social identity theory approach and integrated threat theory, group identification is important for perceiving threats and expressing corresponding attitudes. Nevertheless, their independent roles on intergroup outcomes have often been ignored, although they are two of the most salient and important identities when considering support for religious minority rights. We address this gap in research by looking at the associations of religious identity with support for religious minority rights in general and Muslims in particular in parallel to national identity through diversity threat. This study was conducted among the members of majority groups in four Western countries: Australia, Finland, Germany, and Norway (N = 1,532), all of which are characterised as traditionally Christian. We found that a higher religious identification was associated with greater support for religious minority rights in general and for those of Muslims in particular, while national identification had no direct association with support for either groups' religious rights. However, both group identifications were also associated with heightened perceived diversity threat, which in turn, predicted reluctance to support religious minority rights. This demonstrates the dual role that religious identities may play in intergroup relations.

Religious minorities and spiritual assistance. Reflections on the project “Atlas of religious or belief minority rights” in European Union The category of religious minority is particularly relevant within the European Union, where there is a common system for the protection of religious minorities and beliefs. This allows for an assessment of Member States' promotional behaviour. Tools for measuring international human rights provisions are becoming increasingly widespread, even within religious studies. Against this backdrop, the research project Atlas of Religious or Belief Minority Rights opens up possibilities for the legal analysis of how religious minorities' rights are respected and promoted, starting from international standards in this area. From a comparative perspective, the case of spiritual assistance in separate facilities is an interesting field of investigation into the behaviour of EU Member States. Analysis of the project results highlights the need to reform the regulation of spiritual assistance, particularly in countries with a historical religious majority, to take into account the changed religious landscape in Europe. Recognition of the legal status of old and new religious and belief minorities largely determines access to rights. SOMMARIO: 1. Introduzione. La categoria di minoranza religiosa entro il sistema delle fonti multilivello. La creazione di un sistema di tutela comune nello spazio Ue e la valutazione delle politiche degli Stati membri dell’Unione europea. - 2. Le minoranze religiose e di convinzione alla prova delle tecniche di misurazione del rispetto e promozione dei diritti umani. Il caso dell’Atlas of religious or belief minority rights. - 3. L’assistenza spirituale nelle structure separate. International standards e giurisprudenza europea nel sistema di valutazione dei comportamenti degli Stati membri. - 4. Il diritto all’assistenza spirituale negli Stati membri Ue: spunti per un’analisi comparata. - 5. Osservazioni conclusive. Verso una riforma condivisa dell’approccio alla tutela dei diritti delle minoranze di religione e convinzione.

INTRODUCTION The central argument of this book is that in the United States, the protection of religious minorities from persecution has been contingent on state actors and their perceptions of threats to political order. If they regard religious minorities as a threat to political order, state actors are more likely to allow civil society to persecute them, or to join in the persecution. If, however, state actors see a greater threat in the persecution itself, they will act to protect religious minorities. This explanation is at odds with the two dominant conceptual approaches to religious freedom in the United States. One approach sees religious freedom in America as preordained either by the constitution or by the conditions of religious pluralism that have existed since the colonial period. In this explanation, incidents of persecution have occurred throughout history, but these have ultimately expanded the legal conception of religious freedom that is always changing in the direction of greater inclusiveness. The other approach sees “religious freedom” as ideological cover for white, Protestant majoritarianism and views the persecution of religious minorities as normal, part of a broader system of social domination of all racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. I argue that religious tolerance, enforced by the state, has frequently prevailed in America because state actors see religious intolerance as a threat to their own authority, or to the greater legitimacy of the order on which their authority rests. While this usually secures the long-term physical safety and political rights of religious minorities, breakdowns in religious tolerance have been frequent enough and violent enough to show the contingency of minority well-being on the threat perceptions of state actors. Sometimes the state sees them as the threat to be countered. Neither the constitution nor structural pluralism can protect religious minorities on their own; protection depends on which side the state takes in political conflicts. In this chapter I construct and elaborate on this theory and suggest some likely conditions under which civic actors may succeed or fail in persuading state actors that a religious minority is a political threat. First, however, I contextualize this approach by outlining the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches to religious freedom and persecution in the United States.

The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) of the Council of Europe counts more than 20 years of existence in the European human rights landscape. Normatively, the protection of minority religious identity is embedded in three main articles of the convention: first, under Articles 7 and 8, which outline a general right to freedom of religion, but also under Article 6, which considers religious minority rights for “new” minorities as related to tolerance. The analysis that follows here will unfold in three stages: the first stage will engage with the crucial issue of the scope of protection of the FCNM and how this relates to the protection of religious minority rights contained in the convention in today’s European societies. The second stage will focus on the main relevant articles of the FCNM that concern religious freedom. Starting with Articles 7 and 8 of the FCNM that focus on the religious rights of minorities stricto sensu, the discussion will then extend to Articles 5 and 6 of the FCNM due to their relevance to the exercise of religious rights by minorities in their cultural and diversity management dimensions. This extension is necessary to illustrate the current implications of religious identity for minority–majority relations. Methodologically, the study relies heavily on a detailed survey of the four completed cycles of monitoring, mapping the typology of issues pertaining to religious minorities as encountered by the Advisory Committee to the FCNM (ACFC) in the monitored states. The final stage of the analysis will provide some concluding thoughts on the general contribution of the ACFC towards standard setting on religious freedom in the European context.

India has many religious groups, of which Hindus are a majority, and Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains are minorities. India’s Constitution, adopted in 1950, departed from the existing norms of secularism in Europe and elsewhere, which suggested a strict separation of religion and state. Moreover, freedom of religion is a Fundamental Right guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. With its distinct model of secularism and special provisions for religious minorities, India’s social cohesion arrangement needs special attention. On one hand, the distinct understanding of secularism in the Indian context has led to the advancement of religious pluralism. At the same time, it has invited criticism for selective intervention in the affairs of religious communities from governments in power. The selective intervention has challenged the exclusivity of Indian secularism. This article evaluates the constitutional and theoretical ideas underlying provisions on religious minorities and freedom of religion enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It appraises the idea of religious minorities enshrined in the constitution through a discussion of the process that shaped the idea. The article reflects on the Indian experience of managing the rights of religious minorities and freedom of religion. By analysing a landmark judgement related to freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities, the article evaluates whether the Indian Constitution advances a model of social cohesion by balancing freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities or remains ineffective in achieving the same.

Increasing religious diversity caused by immigration is often perceived as a threat to national majority members' (non)religious worldviews. However, defensive reactions to diversity are not inevitable. Building on the social identity approach and motivated identity construction theory, we argue that (non)religious worldviews that satisfy motivational needs may promote support for religious minorities' rights. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of 1,499 national majority group members in four countries with Christian traditions (Australia, Finland, Germany, and Norway). Participants reported their adherence to a (non)religious worldview in terms of their (dis)belief in God, and also the extent to which their worldview satisfied their needs for belonging, continuity, and meaning in life. The more religious worldview was perceived to satisfy these motives, the more religious majority group members supported religious minorities' rights. Worldview motive satisfaction was not associated with support for religious minorities' rights among the non‐religious. In addition, perceived diversity threat was associated with weaker support for minority rights, but again, this negative effect of threat was less evident among religious participants whose religious worldview satisfied their needs for belonging, continuity, and meaning. We conclude that communities based on a shared (religious) worldview should invest in fulfilling the motivational needs of their members, to foster interreligious solidarity. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

On most aspects of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's performance over his ten-year presidency, history will likely be kind—his cautious, indecisive, middle-of-the-road approach will earn more positive than negative accolades in areas of economic growth, foreign policy and even probably, at the end of the day, corruption. One area that is an unmitigated loss for him in terms of ‘legacy points’, however, is his administration's performance on religious freedom and minority rights. Especially during his second term, minority groups such as the Ahmadiyah, Shi'a and even Christian groups experienced sustained and repeated attacks—increasingly involving the use of violence. Indonesia's much-lauded international reputation for tolerance and pluralism has been tarnished significantly. The score card on this issue is so straightforward that this chapter will not focus its analysis on arguing that minority rights and religious politics in Indonesia have regressed over the past decade; others have already effectively, and repeatedly, made that point. Human Rights Watch (2013: 6), for example, declared that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been inconsistent at best in defending the right to religious freedom. The absence of leadership has emboldened groups willing to use violence against religious minorities and the local and national officials who cater to them. Similarly, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2014: 125) concluded that Indonesia's transition to democracy and economic stability has been marred by sectarian violence, terrorist attacks, the growth of extremist groups, and rising intolerance toward religious minorities and ‘heterodox’ groups. Numerous scholarly and media articles have also noted with concern that Indonesia's famed religious tolerance appears to be on the retreat (Fealy 2011; Jones 2013; Harsono 2014). Rather than reiterate these arguments, this chapter will focus on the role of the president himself in at best allowing, and at worst contributing to, the deterioration of minority rights and the politicisation of religion in Indonesia. Yudhoyono was elected in 2004 on a platform of anti-corruption and forward-looking progress for Indonesia. By the end of his first term, however, significant problems in Indonesia's religious relations were emerging. Nevertheless, he was re-elected in 2009 with a landslide victory and a huge mandate for reform (Timberman 2009).

The article presents a general theoretical description of the legal mechanism for ensuring human rights in Ukraine, as well as proposals for its improvement. It is stated that rights are the most important value given to humans by God. Enshrining human rights in legal sources is an important but insufficient step in ensuring them. Human rights also require organizational, procedural, and educational guarantees. Legal protection of rights is the primary duty of every state. However, only the joint efforts of individuals, the state, and other actors in society will allow for the most effective results in the realization, protection, and defense of human rights. It is emphasized that the legal mechanism for ensuring human rights is a structural element of the social mechanism. The structure of the social mechanism for ensuring human rights includes: religious, moral (ethical), and legal norms; international legal principles and norms; activities of various entities to ensure human rights, etc. The social mechanism for ensuring human rights includes the following mechanisms: 1) the international mechanism for ensuring human rights; 2) the legal mechanism for ensuring human rights (domestic); 3) the mechanism for ensuring human rights through other social means (moral, religious, etc.). The concept of the legal mechanism for ensuring human rights is formulated as a system of effective legal guarantees for the implementation, protection, and defense of human rights enshrined in normative legal acts and other sources of state law, as well as the means by which human legal consciousness is formed. The elements of the legal mechanism for ensuring human rights are highlighted. The report highlights massive human rights violations committed by the Russian Federation as a result of its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. The Russian Federation has caused significant violations of both natural human rights and subjective legal rights enshrined in Ukrainian legislation and is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people. The main directions for improving the mechanism for legal protection of human rights in Ukraine were proposed. Among them, one of the most important is to stop the full-scale military invasion of the Russian Federation into the territory of Ukraine and bring those responsible to justice.

The purpose of the article is to study the current state of implementation and legal protection of the rights of the Roma ethnic minority in Ukraine. It is noted that the Roma lag far behind the main part of the population in terms of education, employment, housing and health care, and are almost completely unrepresented in political institutions. In this regard, a large number of Roma have limited opportunities to improve their quality of life and integrate with the majority of Ukrainian society. It was concluded that the causes of prejudice against Roma and existing restrictions on the realization of their civil rights include: segregation, traditional features of the internal social structure of Roma communities, and the lack of constructive dialogue between Roma communities, local communities, local authorities, and state authorities. An important role in solving these problems belongs to the international foundation «Renaissance», which is one of the largest Ukrainian charitable foundations and non-governmental organization. In order to create conditions for the realization and protection of Roma rights in Ukraine in various spheres of public life, the Council of Europe project «Strengthening the protection of national minorities, including Roma, and minority languages in Ukraine» was launched in 2018, based on the recommendations of two monitoring bodies of the Framework Convention Council of Europe on the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages. The results of sociological research on the current problems of legal protection of the rights of the Roma population are presented. It is emphasized that the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience and the Secretariat of the Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for Human Rights deal with the issues of implementation and protection of Roma rights. It is concluded that the main directions for improving the legal protection of the rights of the Roma population are: carrying out educational work; provision of free legal aid to Roma; strengthening the legal opportunities of Roma; development of bodies of self-organization of the Roma population; establishment of communication between Roma and residents of cities and towns; integration of Roma into Ukrainian society.

The war in Ukraine is the most high-profile war in Europe since the adoption and subsequent consolidation of European minority rights standards developed in the 1990s. Using a chronological approach, this contribution uses the case study of Ukraine to illustrate significant ongoing challenges to the realisation of minority rights and to the monitoring work under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, as well as ongoing contestation and debate over its interpretation and application in specific contexts. It thereby clearly demonstrates the problems of seeing minority rights protection as a linear process of progression and socialisation rather than an ongoing process of negotiation that constantly needs to be adapted to current political realities. This is crucial to discussions not just over the future of minority rights in Ukraine but also to the future work of the Framework Convention Advisory Committee.

This study set out to assess the relationship between variation in human rights for sexual minorities in Asian countries and indicators of HIV prevention among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women. To quantitatively measure the relationship between variation in HIV prevention and variation in human rights for sexual minorities, this study developed the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Human Rights Index (an original index with scores ranging from 0.0 to 1.0). Subsequently, this study collected 237 epidemiological and behavioral studies from 22 Asian countries and performed a series of meta-analyses in order to calculate national averages for five indicators of HIV prevention: HIV prevalence, inconsistent condom use, recent HIV testing, adequate HIV knowledge, and exposure to HIV prevention services. A change of human rights for sexual minorities from a score of 0.0 to 1.0 as measured by the SOGI Human Rights Index was correlated with a decrease in unprotected anal intercourse by 25.5% (p=0.075), and increases in recent HIV testing by 42.9% (p=0.011), HIV knowledge by 29.5% (p=0.032), and exposure to HIV prevention services by 37.9% (p=0.119). The relationship between HIV prevalence and variation in human rights for sexual minorities was not statistically significant. Our study found correlations between human rights and indicators of HIV prevention, further supporting the need for increased rights among marginalized populations. The paucity of studies from many Asian countries as well as the disparity in how indicators of HIV prevention are measured reveals a need for increased coverage and standardization of MSM serological and behavioral data in order to better inform evidence-based policymaking.

Background Scholars have found that as a multi-facet phenomenon, religion has a complicated relationship with people's health well-being. However, current research on health and religion has left a vacuum in understanding why we observe widespread health disparities between the majority and minority religious groups. Purpose The present study is aimed at two purposes. First, we conduct a cross-national comprehensive examination of the relationship between religious minority/majority status and self-rated health. Second, we investigate the moderating potential of political contexts on the relationship in question. Methods Drawing from the 2010–2014 wave of World Values Survey, we construct an analytic sample containing about 70,000 individual cases nested within 51 countries, and apply multilevel modeling to account for the hierarchical data structure. Results We first find that religious minorities are less likely to report good/very good health status relative to members of majority group. However, we note that the religious minority health disadvantage is driven by a few country outliers. After exclusion of any of these country outliers from the analysis, there is no significant health difference between majority and minority groups. Moreover, we find that political contexts moderate the health effect of being a religious minority. In countries with low levels of democracy or heavy religious restriction on minority groups, people of minority groups are less likely to report good/very good health compared with those belonging to majority group. By contrast, in societies with high levels of democracy or low levels of religious restriction, the health dispartities between religious majority and minority groups become non-significant. A series of sensitivity analysis, including using multiple-imputation sample and different ways of coding key variables, provides credibility to the results. Conclusions and Implications This study's findings suggest that religious minorities experience health disadvantage, only when minority groups are denied of political and religious freedom. Compared with past works that mostly focused on a single or a few societies, this study provides large-scale, cross-national evidence for the issue of religious minority health. This study also adds to our understanding of how political context shapes the health impacts of religion.

The politics and administration of institutional change