When rights are not enough: bridging international legal frameworks and endangered language preservation through Middle Eastern policy models

Aiming at the maintenance of biodiversity and healthy ecosystem in the world – vital issues of the 21st century – it is important to preserve linguistic diversity and prevent the increasing language endangerment, thus ensuring the support of linguistic human rights. The author presents a comprehensive explanation of the key terms related to linguistic diversity and language ecology and investigates if educational language rights in international and regional Charters/Conventions support the maintenance of indigenous, tribal and minority languages (the world’s linguistic diversity), thus preventing language endangerment. The answer is that most educational systems in the word today support linguistic genocide in relation to indigenous, tribal and minority children’s language rights, by providing subtractive education as capability deprivation (according to Amartya Sen), which leads to poverty and violation of human rights in general. The author also argues why linguistic diversity and language rights are important for the maintenance of biodiversity and thus a healthy ecosystem. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/sm-2018-0011

Summary Aiming at the maintenance of biodiversity and healthy ecosystem in the world – vital issues of the 21st century – it is important to preserve linguistic diversity and prevent the increasing language endangerment, thus ensuring the support of linguistic human rights. The author presents a comprehensive explanation of the key terms related to linguistic diversity and language ecology and investigates if educational language rights in international and regional Charters/Conventions support the maintenance of indigenous, tribal and minority languages (the world’s linguistic diversity), thus preventing language endangerment. The answer is that most educational systems in the word today support linguistic genocide in relation to indigenous, tribal and minority children’s language rights, by providing subtractive education as capability deprivation (according to Amartya Sen), which leads to poverty and violation of human rights in general. The author also argues why linguistic diversity and language rights are important for the maintenance of biodiversity and thus a healthy ecosystem.

This article examines how the acceptance of subjectively-defined language rights may promote non-communication and exclusion through examining aspects of language politics in the post-Yugoslav states. International linguistic human rights advocates are taking on board subjective definitions of language communities. An international linguistic human rights framework is evolving which requires states actively to maintain linguistic identities. Language is seen as an essential part of a community's identity and self-esteem, which in turn is seen as crucial to securing harmonious interethnic relations and preventing violent conflict. Yet the treatment of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs as separate language communities has tended to legitimise ethnic divisions and social exclusion.

Languages are today being murdered faster than ever before in human history: 90% of the world's oral languages may be dead or moribund (no longer learned by children) in a hundred years' time. The media and the educational systems are the most important direct agents in language murder. Behind them are the real culprits, the global economic, military and political systems. Linguistic human rights might be one way of promoting conflict prevention and self-determination, preventing linguistic genocide, and maintaining linguistic diversity and biodiversity (which are correlationally and also causally related). The most basic linguistic human rights for maintenance of linguistic diversity, specifically the right to mother tongue medium education, are not protected by the present provisions in human rights law. Linguistically, formal education is today often 'forcibly transferring children of one group to another group' (one of the definitions of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention). Human rights are supposed to act as correctives to the 'free market'. Despite good intentions, forces behind economic globalisation have instead given brutal market forces free range.

Languages are today being killed at a much faster pace than ever before in human history and linguistic diversity is disappearing relatively faster than biological diversity. Still, linguistic diversity is as necessary for the existence of our planet as biodiversity, and the two are correlated. Linguistic human rights are a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for the maintenance of linguistic diversity. Violations of linguistic human rights, especially in education, may lead to both ethnically articulated conflict and to reduction of linguistic and cultural diversity on our planet. The article analyses to what extent present linguistic human rights, especially in education, are sufficient to protect and maintain linguistic diversity and to function as the necessary corrective to the `free' market.

African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model.

Everything about human right is inalienable void of violation from the human race. It is therefore that responsibility of the international community in ensuring the effective preservation and respect of these rights without any threat of violations. In ensuring its recognition and implementation, international standards have been established where there is the need of States parties to these international human right treaties in ensuring its incorporation in its various domestic legislations. The content and specific features of the introduction of international human rights standards into national legislation have been analyzed in the article. The methodological basis of research is a set of general scientific and special methods, in particular, dialectical, historical-legal, epistemological, comparative-legal. International standards for the protection of human rights have been defined as principles and norms enshrined in international regulatory legal acts that define fundamental human rights and freedoms, the obligation of the State to respect them, to assist in their realization, preservation and protection against unlawful encroachments, and to establish liability for their violations and methods of protection. It has been clarified that the procedure of implementation of international human rights standards into national legislation includes the following stages: (i) recognition of human rights by the State and their enshrinement in national legislation; (ii) institutionalization of the standard of human rights protection; (iii) bringing the current legislation in line with the international human rights standard and interpreting the latter; (iv) establishment of measures and means of protection and defense of human rights; (v) determining the procedure for the realization of the enshrined right; (vi) control over the observance of the international human rights standard.

Reviewed by: Language: A right and a resource: Approaching linguistic human rights ed. by Miklós Kontra, et al. Daniel O. Jackson Language: A right and a resource: Approaching linguistic human rights. Ed. by Miklós Kontra, Robert Phillipson, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, and Tibor Várady. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 346. Paper $23.95. This volume of surveys and case studies by fifteen contributors originated in the Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs) Conference and Workshop held in Budapest in October 1997. The editors’ introductory chapter (1–21) clarifies the task of approaching LHRs from multiple disciplines and describes common principles underlying the volume. The book’s chapters appear under five headings beginning with ‘General issues’, which contains a chapter by Robert Phillipson (25–46). Phillipson discusses the dominance of English and other international languages in organizations like the United Nations and identifies the relationship of the diffusion of English versus the ecology of local languages to LHRs as an area for language policy to reconcile. Next, Angéline Martel (47–80) addresses the role of litigation and language rights activism in the context of Canadian Francophone environments, concluding that conditions exist under which the legal system can be a very powerful language planning tool (79). Miklós Kontra (81–97) studies beliefs about linguistic rights in six Central European countries, describing the context and reasons behind the prohibition of Hungarian in order to illustrate the linguistic roots of interethnic conflict in the region. Mart Rannut (99–114) then offers insight into three different language planning models, focusing on the interaction between and implementation strategies among these models, defining LHRs (110), and distinguishing them as both individual and collective. Rannut concludes that a multiple language planning model based on LHRs is needed. In the next section, ‘Legal issues’, Fernand de Varennes (117–46) [End Page 640] specifies the existing rights affecting language preferences of minorities and nations under international law as these relate to public and private use, discussing the extension of these rights to groups beyond citizens and national minorities. Bart Driessen (147–65) outlines the implications of international trade obligations and guidelines for EU admission in the treatment of linguistic minorities in Slovakia. Under ‘Market issues’, François Grin (169–86) discusses the macro-level implications of the relationship between language and economics, especially the role of labor market dynamics in language spread, concluding that market forces can serve to support linguistic diversity. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (187–222) focuses on LHRs in the free market and in education, analyzing how rights are formulated in official documents and examining the gap between such documents and the acceptance of education through the medium of the mother tongue as a human right. Amir Hassanpour (223–41) demonstrates the interplay between state and market regulators of LHRs, reporting on Turkish opposition to the Kurdish media. ‘Language planning issues’ includes a chapter by Uldis Ozolins (245–62), who examines in detail oft-criticized language policies in the Baltic states. Ina Druviete (263–76) extends this focus solely to the Latvian case. Under the final heading, ‘Education and ethnicity issues’, chapters by István Muzsnai (279–96) and Andrea Szalai (297–315) investigate the fulfillment of LHRs among Deaf and Gypsy minorities in Hungary, respectively. A concluding chapter by Klára Sandor (317–31) discusses the promotion of involuntary language shift among Rumania’s Csángós by the Catholic Church. Graduate students, sociolinguists, lawyers, and legislators engaged in discussions of linguistic rights will find the broad range of the volume and its focus on key issues in the advancement of LHRs informative and noteworthy. Daniel O. Jackson University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Linguistic human rights (LHRs) envelop many questions and ambiguous areas of language pedagogy and sociolinguistics. Difficulties arise as one must understand, due to the demands of linguistic rights, what treatment is owed to whom while balancing the sensitivities of a culture and the linguistic demands of individuals. Further, linguistic concerns themselves are highly complex, as one language may be endangered while another is privileged—complicating LHRs as one navigates the many interests and differences found in language use and acquisition in any given culture or community. Through secondary research, this paper will work toward identifying the difficulties they face, in part by looking at historical developments of LHRs and language education in the West. This secondary research primarily focused on peer-review publications within the last ten years, with key terms including “linguistic human rights,” “language rights,” “culture and language,” and “bilingualism and court decisions.” This approach to linguistic human rights will help reveal the differences in value individuals hold toward language education depending on various factors (e.g., immigration, political conflict, cultural identity) and the interplay between linguistic rights and language education. Additionally, it is through this approach that one sees the variety of responses and proposed solutions to the issues surrounding LHRs, but disagreement on how best to address the issue of LHRs remains. Ultimately, both researchers and instructors would benefit from being aware of linguistic human rights and historical interactions between cultures and language rights, as both shape the education—and therefore the lives—of students.

The language of rights is central to how language problems are approached today. Policy documents and academic literature put language rights at the heart of their analysis. Language rights-based policies are displacing traditional language planning, while sociolinguistic studies have become studies of language rights. Language rights are also increasingly discussed as human rights, inspired by the remarkable expansion of international human rights advocacy over the last couple of decades. Human rights have been looked to as values for a 'godless' or post-political age (Klug, 2000; Laïdi, 1998). In recent decades radicals and reformers have turned to law to address the spectrum of social concerns, disappointed with the inability of politics and economics to change societies globally (Bowring, 2008; Brown and Halley, 2002; Grigg-Spall and Ireland, 1992; King, 1997; Klug, 2000; Shute and Hurley, 1993). This turn to law contrasts with earlier left- wing scepticism towards law, which highlighted undemocratic legal power, legal abuses and miscarriages of justice (Griffith, 1977). International law is particularly associated by human rights advocates, with non-violence, and international politics with war and state violence (Robertson, 1999). This pattern was observed over seventy years ago by the international relations historian E.H. Carr (Carr, 1939, p. 219).

Despite the demand for attention to language rights concerns, no coherent structure for legal analysis of language rights exists either in the United States or at the level of international human rights law. This article turns to the important differences that exist between the U.S. and international human rights law approaches to language rights as fertile ground for exchange of ideas with the goal of improving the consideration of language claims. The United States legal system relies on a non-discrimination civil rights approach to language claims, which treats language largely as a handicap for non-English speakers. The international human rights law approach is centered on language as an essential and valuable element of culture and identity. The article urges the U.S. legal system to adopt elements of the human rights cultural approach and conversely suggests that international human rights law should augment its approach with more stringent U.S.-style non-discrimination standards. The article posits that more comprehensive and just treatment of language rights would result if each legal system addressed both equal protection and cultural identity concerns in recognizing language rights.The article then proposes a doctrinal framework for analysis that would implement this approach to language rights. The framework begins with the three factors identified as determinative, yet largely invisible, in the current handling of language rights claims under both the cultural and non-discrimination approaches: 1) the private, public or quasi-public setting in which the right is sought to be exercised; 2) the negative or affirmative nature of the language right sought; and 3) the rights claimant’s monolingual or bilingual language fluency in the minority and majority languages. It utilizes these three factors to develop a scheme for recognition of specific language rights that builds on existing language rights concepts in the U.S. and international human rights systems but provides a more systematic structure for addressing language claims.

Contents: Preface. Introduction. Part I: Setting the Scene. What Is Happening to the Languages of the World. Connections Between Biodiversity and Linguistic and Cultural Diversity. Mother Tongue(s), Culture, Ethnicity, and Self-Determination. Linguistic Diversity--Curse or Blessing? To Be Maintained or Not? Why? Part II: Linguistic Genocide, State Policies, and Globalisation. State Policies Towards Languages--Linguistic Genocide, Language Death, or Support for Languages? Globalisation, Power, and Control. Part III: Struggle Against Linguistic Genocide and for Linguistic Human Rights in Education. Linguistic Human Rights. Linguistic Human Rights in Education? Alternatives to Genocide and Dystopia.

ABSTRACTThis article provides an overview of key developments in the field of language rights over the last 40 years. It traverses disciplinary debates within sociolinguistics, political theory and international law that bear on the question of what rights, if any, are attributable to minority language speakers within modern nation-states and an increasingly globalised world dominated by English. The article focuses on three broad responses to the question of minority language rights—language endangerment and language ecology, linguistic human rights and the influence of English as a global language, and the legal principles and parameters underpinning the prospective expansion of minority language rights. Specific implications for Aotearoa New Zealand are also briefly discussed.Stephen May

Regional human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court of Human and People's Rights (ACtHPR) have become popular sites of mobilization for victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home. Besides being platforms for individual remedy, human rights courts increasingly shape social norms and state policy within countries, making them attractive avenues for rights advocates to develop new norms or to push domestic authorities to reform legislation. The judges of these courts can decide, for example, whether same-sex couples have a right to be married, if prisoners have the right to vote or receive HIV/AIDS treatment, or when a state can deport illegal immigrants to a country where they will likely be tortured. As these courts pass their judgments, they often find themselves in conflict with states that are violating human rights of marginalized groups on a large scale and are unwilling to implement international rulings. Although international human rights courts have become increasingly popular venues among victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home, we are only beginning to understand how activists play roles in shaping the development of regional human rights courts' case law—the body of judgments that shapes how judges will make their decisions in the future. We now have plenty of international relations and international legal research on the interactions between states and international courts: how judges in these courts wrestle between deferring to the interests of member state governments whose actions are on trial and sticking closely to the conventions' fundamental yet evolving principles (Alter et al., 2019; Helfer & Voeten, 2014). As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al., 2018; Sandholtz et al., 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon. Without an adequate understanding of the factors shaping activists' engagement with international courts, we risk undervaluing their strategic impact on the expansion of case law, the human rights protection of marginalized groups who cannot find remedies at home, and the domestic implementation of these judgments in an age of state backlash. In this section, we summarize the three papers contained in this symposium and their original contributions to these themes. Over the last decade, dozens of countries have erected legal barriers or started vilifying campaigns to stymie the work of NGOs (Buyse, 2018; Chaudhry, 2022). One tactic in this toolkit is the enactment of burdensome regulation on NGOs that receive funds from foreign donors as they allegedly promote foreign agendas (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013; Dupuy et al., 2021). States that frequently abuse human rights are especially prone to target NGOs that engage in strategic litigation (Hillebrecht, 2019). Most NGOs depend on foreign funding, and NGOs that litigate international cases fall disproportionately in this category, but do funders affect the selection of cases? In “Foreign Agents or Agents of Justice? Private Foundations, NGO Backlash, and International Human Rights Litigation,” Heidi Haddad and Lisa Sundstrom examine the extent to which Western donors, particularly private foundations, have encouraged NGOs in Europe to litigate at the ECtHR as a human rights advocacy strategy. They examine overall patterns of donor funding and NGO litigation records, and look in more detail at the case of Russian NGOs' foreign funding and litigation records. The analysis is extremely timely, as the Russian government's criminalization of independent civil society actors, especially in the human rights field, and their accusation that foreign funding turns NGOs into “foreign agents” have been crucial elements of the Russian regime's autocratization. This claim has also provided fuel for Russia's disenchantment with the ECtHR in recent years, contributing to the assessment of many observers that Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine was the last straw in an inevitable collision course leading to its exit from the Council of Europe. Haddad and Sundstrom debunk the idea that foreign donors are pushing NGOs toward strategies of human rights litigation. Instead, they argue, there is more evidence that NGOs themselves promoted the mechanism of international litigation as a strategy that donors later adopted. This article is a poignant reminder of the advocacy tools that Russian human rights activists and citizens have lost as a result of their government's departure from the Council of Europe, including ECtHR jurisdiction. Yet it also provides insight into the likely roles of foreign donors in other country cases where NGOs are using international court litigation as a human rights advocacy strategy, which is often a target of the ire of national governments, as explored in the next article in the symposium. When states attack human rights NGOs within their borders and/or international human rights courts themselves, how does this affect the willingness of those NGOs to take cases to international courts, and the ways in which they do so? De Silva and Plagis ask this question in their article about state backlash against NGOs in the case of Tanzania and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. A fascinating empirical question they pose is: does state backlash against NGOs increase NGO litigation at international courts (to contest state repression at those courts and use international mechanisms when domestic ones are not available), roughly in line with Keck and Sikkink's famous “boomerang pattern” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), or decrease it due to heightened fear and restricted NGO capabilities that state repression creates? Employing a process-tracing analysis of NGOs' involvement in three cases before the African Court at different stages of the Tanzanian government's backlash against the Court, De Silva and Plagis find that “two-level backlash” by states can result in both phenomena, either promoting or deterring NGO legal mobilization at international human rights courts, depending on certain conditions. The three selected cases concerning the death penalty, the rights of persons with albinism, and the rights of pregnant schoolgirls and mothers, which took place at different time periods, demonstrate a number of patterns of state backlash interacting with NGO strategies. The authors find that domestic-level state backlash deterred domestic NGOs from partnering with international NGOs in litigation, but that such backlash, when it repressed domestic political and legal mobilization opportunities, actually encouraged both Tanzanian and international NGOs to turn to the African Court more frequently to seek remedies. International-level backlash in turn only deterred NGOs from international litigation when such backlash consisted of state efforts to restrict NGOs' ability to engage in litigation, and not when the international backlash was in the form of routine noncompliance with African Court rulings. Importantly, the authors find that NGO responses to state backlash were significantly shaped by their degree of legal consciousness and expertise with the rules, proceedings, and workings of the African Court. Those NGOs with less knowledge and experience were more likely to back away from engaging with the Court under the pressure of state backlash. De Silva and Plagis conclude that “NGOs' persistent human rights advocacy in the face of state backlash is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that they may not be deterred by state backlash initially, but there is a danger that their continued determination to engage in international litigation could prompt governments to engage in even more severe forms of backlash, with critical impacts on international courts and already vulnerable human rights defenders. Rights advocates have a growing menu of institutions and courts available to them. How do activists choose at which institution to lodge their cases in a world where legal remedies have diversified, or as some have argued, fragmented (Koskenniemi & Leino, 2002)? In “What Makes an International Institution Work for Labor Activists? Shaping International Law through Strategic Litigation,” Filiz Kahraman goes beyond the tendency of legal mobilization studies to only examine how activists interact with a single court or institution. Instead, Kahraman opens up how rights advocates imagine which institution is most receptive to their claims. Drawing on a comparative interview study of British and Turkish trade union activists and their legal mobilization campaigns at international courts and quasi-judicial institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), Kahraman examines how activists first probe and then strategically identify which court or international institution is most susceptible to their primary goals of influencing structural reforms and setting new norms. Through this probing process—or dynamic signaling game between courts and litigants—activists push a court's jurisprudence and case law into new issue areas. For instance, at the ECtHR, Turkish trade unionists challenged domestic courts' ruling that public sector workers did not have the right to establish unions, even though the ECtHR had no established case law on labor rights in 1990s. They won the case, with the ECtHR finding that Turkey violated the right of public sector workers to unionize. These cases not only had an impact within Turkey, but over the next decades, similar cases brought by British unionists would spin off the early precedent set by the Turkish legal mobilization efforts. Kahraman argues that they ultimately pushed the ECtHR to recognize the basic trade union rights as fundamental human rights. Kahraman sheds light on the often hidden strategies behind international litigation. Activists litigate not just for the immediate impact on the current case they work on, but how they envision that all the cases they work on may shape norms and domestic structural reforms further in the future. Whether an institution is perceptive of claims lies in the eye of the beholder. Kahraman finds that besides targeting institutions with high compliance rates, they also take cases to institutions with low rates of compliance, especially “if these institutions have extensive judicial authority to create new international norms.” So, it is not the de jure protection set by an international courts, but rather how activists perceive the juridical responsiveness and judicial authority of courts—or, how judges adopt either an activist approach or restraint in response to incoming cases and how willing states are to implement cases of a court, respectively—that determines why activists select certain courts or quasi-judicial institutions (like the ILO). Kahraman gives us new tools to interpret how activists perceive authority and receptiveness and respond to opportunities. Rather than static external legal remedies, courts and quasi-judicial institutions are opportunity structures that are malleable to the strategic vision of the activist or litigant. The articles in this symposium together reveal a number of key overlapping insights. At the broadest level, they demonstrate that activists' behaviors and strategies influence international courts' jurisprudence, politics within states, and the human rights outcomes of everyday citizens—and these influences have often been hidden in our existing canon of research on international courts. In addition, all of these articles show that, while activists may face challenges in their efforts, often including significant backlash from their home state governments, they also continue to retain significant agency through their creative efforts to develop legal strategies and circumvent state repression. Activists perennially innovate: sparking the ideas that inspire donors who fund them; calculating how to continue their litigation work when government actors threaten them; and taking risks in litigation to push courts to expand how they define human rights. However, along with these uplifting conclusions, there are worrying patterns that demand future research. States are increasingly pushing back against the powers of international courts to bind them to costly measures, and as this symposium has shown, national governments often point to activists as contributors to this “problem” of invasive international human rights standards. A growing body of research has tracked how human rights defenders of all kinds globally are under threat from actors like governments and corporations who disagree with their contentious actions. We need more studies that gather comprehensive data and systematically track these threats, specifically with regard to activists who engage in international human rights litigation. We suspect that such activists are likely disproportionately targeted due to the international visibility of their complaints. We also desperately need research into possible innovative responses to these threats to activists—responses from activists, funders, governments of countries that support human rights, and international courts themselves. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the Toxic Crimes Project. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She is the director of the ActinCourts network at UBC and conducts research on legal mobilization by Russian activists.

This paper examines language rights in the light of international law instruments. The paper contends that although international law provides for a number of language rights only very few of them can be regarded as universal human rights. First, the paper describes the purpose of language rights protection. Second, it analyses the scope of language rights protection and distinguishes between individual and collective language rights. Third, three basic categories of individual rights addressing language questions are analysed, i.e. procedural linguistic human rights, freedom of expression and nondiscrimination on the grounds of language. Next, language rights of persons belonging to minorities are examined. Finally, the paper concludes that under international law language rights which are universal human rights include linguistic aspects of the right to a fair trial and the right to liberty and security as well as the right of non-discrimination on the grounds of language use in private sphere. The language rights protected otherwise do not fall within the category of human rights and their protection is not universal.