The “Bolzano Draft Convention” for Fundamental Rights of European Nationalities

Abstract

With the political change in Europe 1989/90, minority issues with its potential for conflict motivated international governmental organisations like the CSCE or the Council of Europe (CoE) to look into the matter. At that time, South Tyrol – with the implementation of the second South Tyrolean autonomy (1972) since already two decades – disposed of many good experiences with the protection of minorities and the peaceful coexistence of several linguistic groups. For that reason South Tyrol could provide important impulses for the regulation of modern minority protection in Europe. So in 1991 three proposals for minority protection came into existence within the frame of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Two of them, the proposal of the CoE Venice Commission and the Austrian draft protocol to the ECHR, represented the viewpoint of concerned states, and one, the so-called “Bolzano Draft Convention,” represented the viewpoint of concerned minorities. The latter was elaborated by the author of this article, coordinated with the governing South Tyrolean People’s Party, subsequently further developed and approved by the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) in 1992 and, after having been revised in wake of the Council of Europe Summit of 1993, once again legitimated by the FUEN in 1994. All these efforts essentially contributed to the conclusion of the CoE Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 1995, which came into force in 1998.