International Minority Rights Research Articles

Reliance on International Treaties as a Means of Protecting Minority Rights: An Effective Strategy or Waiting for Nothing? The Case of the Polish Minority in Lithuania

This article focuses on the legal and political impact of international minority rights treaties on the Polish minority in Lithuania. An analysis will be made as to whether and to what degree they have been followed by Lithuania, and, overall, whether they have been effective for the Polish minority in Lithuania. The possibility that they are more of a false promise will also be addressed, and whether or not reliance on international law – perhaps in conjunction with local political action within Lithuania – is a good strategy for Poles in Lithuania. In general, international law norms have not had a direct impact, at least as applied by various international tribunals and other bodies. Cases brought by ethnic Poles before the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the U.N. Human Rights Committee have not yielded significant results. The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities does directly address many of the issues raised by the Polish minority, but it is not enforceable absent enabling legislation. Yet, recent positive domestic legislation and case law in Lithuania have mitigated these concerns, suggesting that political mobilization, using international norms as a benchmark to be obtained, is much more effective than relying on international law on its own.

When Global Scripts Do Not Resonate: International Minority Rights and Local Repertoires of Diversity in Southern Turkey

When Global Scripts Do Not Resonate: International Minority Rights and Local Repertoires of Diversity in Southern Turkey

Immigration and Multicultural Citizenship in Europe: Insights from the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities

Abstract Multicultural citizenship, a set of group-differentiated rights for minority cultural groups, is now a common feature of most domestic legal systems in Europe. The conventional view, widely reflected in practice, suggests that ‘strong’ rights of this sort should be restricted to so-called ‘historical’ minorities. However, the increasingly long-standing presence of distinct cultural groups of immigrant origin raises the question of whether, and to what extent, the latter should also be granted stronger forms of multicultural citizenship. This article addresses this question by reference to the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, a central pillar of the international minority rights regime in Europe. The article analyses the application of the treaty to immigrant-origin groups in the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, showing that the scope of protection afforded to such groups is stronger than previously assumed, though less far-reaching as compared to their ‘historical’ counterparts.

Protecting the Rights of Minorities under International Law and Implications of COVID-19: An Overview of the Indian Context

The concept of majority rule and respect for minority rights is demonstrated in several constitutions of the world. Oppression by the majority of the minority is barred by articles of these respective constitutions. Today, democracy is mostly a method of government of the people that is ruled by the people. The issue of minority rights is at the center of the concept of civic rights. Minority protection, thus, operates on the hypothesis that religious, cultural, and linguistic affiliations are essential features of the very notion of a civic, just society. This paper offers an alternative account of why minority rights have international significance and more information on the value of an international, socially just process for the allocation of resources by states. By this approach, international minority rights speak to the wrongs that international law itself produces by organizing international political reality into a legal order. This article focuses on the uncertain effect of religious autonomy in India and the outcome of democracy in the country. While the Indian constitution guarantees autonomy to its religious minorities and promises minorities their freedoms, Indian democracy, which was once considered remarkable in scale and duration, has been weakened by the rise of xenophobic nationalism and threats to religious minorities. Even the safety and religious freedom of minorities have been compromised during COVID-19. In the last few decades, these trends have been clear; however, they have dramatically increased in the last few years, and the administration has turned a blind eye.

Examining the Suitability of the International Minority Rights Regime as an Avenue for Advancing Self-Determination Claims

The international legal right of all ‘peoples’ to self-determination applies indeterminately to minority groups. The limited jurisprudence tends toward an ‘internal’ dimension of the right being available to minorities, to be exercised and negotiated domestically. However, where a state-minority negotiation process fails, the international law of self-determination is inadequate to resolve the ensuing deadlock. Accordingly, this article examines the suitability of minority protections under international human rights law (‘minority rights’) as a supplementary set of rules by which disputes concerning the self-determination of minorities might be resolved. It argues that owing to the strong conceptual and doctrinal overlap between the two areas, the enforcement of minority rights is a suitable strategy for advancing a self-determination claim. However, two bars within existing international human rights enforcement procedures – the non-justiciability of self-determination, and the requirement that complainants must be “victims of a violation” – substantially reduce the utility of this strategy at present.

Interaction between Protection of Sunni Minority under International Law and National Security of Islamic Republic of Iran

It appears that in accordance with the regulations of International Minority Rights Law, Iranian Sunni Muslims constitute a religious minority. The instrumental aim of the minorities’ protection system is to prevent conflict between persons belonging to minorities and those of majority populations in the light of territorial integrity, domestic stability and the national security of the states involved. The authors maintain that protecting the Sunni minority and observing their internationally recognised rights in Iran – through removing the reasons behind dissatisfactions of persons belonging to this group, resolving potential religious conflicts and promoting national integration – have a direct link with the maintenance of internal stability of the country, which, in the long term, tend to reinforce Iran’s national security and provide a good pattern for other countries in the region or other parts of the world.

Group Rights, Collective Goods, and the Problem of Cross-border Minority Protection

This article argues that there are both practical and conceptual reasons for relaxing the prevailing state-centric frameworks for minority protection in the global arena. The article discusses two example cases: the indigenous Sami and the Roma travellers. It draws on analyses of the kinds of rights protected by the key international minority rights documents, and the kinds of goods these rights provide access to. The article argues that the cross-border nature of certain minorities poses specific challenges to the prevailing system of distributing responsibilities for protecting minorities across individual states, each of which has territorially limited obligations. It concludes by paving the way towards a more cosmopolitan institutional approach to cross-border minority protections.

On Writing and Routing Rights

On Writing and Routing Rights James B. Loeffler (bio) The history of human rights is often told either as a timeless myth of Judeo-Christian religious principles or a modern fable about Holocaust-inspired universal justice. Individual Jews figure prominently in these metanarratives, as do casual claims about Jewish ethics, but Jewishness, in the form of specific Jewish political commitments, communal attachments, and collective identities, is alternately taken for granted or passed over in silence. In Rooted Cosmopolitans, I went hunting for these missing Jewish contexts and backstories in human-rights history. The result is a different account of the origins of international human rights and the Jewish roles within that story. Shifting the focus from the United Nations immediately after World War II to prewar Eastern Europe, I trace a rising generation of Jewish legal activists who pioneered many of the legal principles and advocacy techniques that turned human rights from a philosophical ideal into a concrete project of international law. Contrary to popular perceptions today, I argue that what mattered most in their Jewish pathways into human-rights activism was neither their shared marginality nor their universalist sensibilities but a conscious engagement with Jewish politics. This transnational Jewish network spread outward from World War I–era Eastern Europe to encompass the length and breadth of the twentieth-century Jewish world. For that reason, I am very grateful to the editors of Shofar for assembling such a wonderful cohort of scholars to interpret my book from such a variety of geographical and methodological vantage points. These expert commentaries, at once attuned to key historical moments evoked in my narrative and larger historiographical questions, present an embarrassment of riches for my author's response. I cannot do them all the justice that they deserve here. Instead, I offer some brief thoughts, organized roughly by chronology, on the questions they raise about the points of intersection between Jews and human-rights history. [End Page 192] That history has its own history, Arie Dubnov reminds us, beginning with the earlier work of scholars who charted the career of international minorities' protection from the second half of the nineteenth century through the fracture point of World War I and the rise of the League of Nations. He reads my narrative against that historiographical backdrop and observes some key differences in my choice of historical actors and causal claims. He applauds my determination to push past the contemporary false dichotomy that divides Jewish nationalism from international human rights but wonders whether in my quest to de-essentialize human-rights history, I also risk reifying Zionism as the normative paradigm for early Jewish international legal advocacy. More specifically, he asks, do not non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish rights-defenders deserve a larger place in the interwar story of Jewish minority-rights activism? This is a crucial question with implications for the entire field of Jewish human-rights history, especially in light of contemporary extracurricular political debates. Emphasizing the conspicuous Zionist presence in the ranks of human-rights activism certainly carries the risk of methodological side-shadowing, obscuring other contemporaneous Jewish voices and historical actors. But in my estimation, the greater danger remains historiographical back-shadowing, that we project back into the past our contemporary assumptions and anxieties about Zionism and Jewish internationalism. The biography of Lucien Wolf is actually a good example of this problem. His diaries and his publicistic work suggest a crucial figure in interwar international rights protection. Yet a closer look reveals a role overinflated in posterity. To be sure, his story is an important one—and a fascinating one at that. But ultimately it belongs more to the equally crucial history of pre-1920s international liberalism rather than to that of interwar legal thought and Jewish minority-rights advocacy. The same is true of the Austro-Marxists and their East European Jewish followers. For all of the ways in which we might imagine that Bundist national-cultural autonomy must have birthed international minority rights, there is little evidence of that connection. The reasons [End Page 193] are simple. Both Western Jewish liberals and East European Bundists professed a fundamental ambivalence about global Jewish peoplehood. Nonnationalist liberals wished to protect their...

Democracy and the Preservation of Minority Identity: Fragmentation within the European Human Rights Framework

The international human rights (ihr) and international minority rights (imr) regimes have very different origins. However, the two regimes converged in the 20th century, and imr are now understood to be a sub-regime of ihr. This article argues that the different historical origins of the two regimes impact how actors within each regime interpret their mission, and have resulted in institutional fragmentation within the Council of Europe. The mission of the European Court of Human Rights is the promotion and protection of democracy, whereas the Advisory Committee to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minority’s mission is the preservation of minority identity. In practice, this has led to conflicting interpretations of multi-sourced equivalent norms. It is suggested that inter-institutional dialogue provides an avenue through which these conflicting interpretations can be mediated.

Ethnicity in China: a critical introduction

Map Chronology Preface Acknowledgements List of Acronyms 1. The People s Republic of China as a Multi-National Country 2. Ethnic Inequality 3. Minority Cultures 4. Regional Autonomy 5. Intra- and Inter-Group Differences 6. Tibet and Xinjiang 7. China s Nationality Policy and International Minority Rights Bibliography

Are Religious Minorities Really Minorities?

This article will argue that although, historically, religious minorities were the primary trigger for the institutionalization of the international framework of minority rights, they have long since been sidelined from its protections. This sidelining is evident in a variety of international human rights norms and mechanisms, the focus below being on the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights Committee. The article offers a number of explanations for this diversion of religious minorities away from the international minority rights regime. It also argues for a cautious reintegration of religious minorities within the minority rights regime after having sought understanding with regard to some issues of concern.

Sovereignty, networks, and norms

Despite considerable scholarly work on ethnic mobilization, less attention has been paid to explicitly examining how differing notions of the state undergird our analysis and normative approaches. As the title of Ted Gurr's Peoples versus States reminds us, the state is central to these processes. Similarly, there seems to be widespread, yet little discussed, disagreement on the proper role of politics in ethno-politics. In other words, at what point do we shrug our shoulders and say, “minority X lost this political fight and that's the way democratic politics functions”? The three books here focus on vastly different topics (international minority rights norms, Native American struggles, and the Holy Roman Empire's decline), but in reading them together it is striking how their notions of the state and politics lead us to varying conclusions about the possibilities for minorities.

Minority Rights in International Law

Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community - either individually or collectively - with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located? To the extent that the field offers answers to this question, it does so from its deep commitment to the protection of certain universal attributes of human identity from the exercise of sovereign power. It protects minority rights on the assumption that religious, cultural and linguistic affiliations are essential features of what it means to be human. There exists an alternative account of why minority rights possess international significance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture and language and more on the value of international distributive justice. On this account, international minority rights speak to wrongs that 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 affiliation and instead challenges the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making.

Minority rights in international law

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

The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands

AbstractIn the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. It suggests that even as east/west binaries structured the unequal application of new international minority rights protections, France, rather than Czechoslovakia, implemented a more radical and racist policy of forcible national classification.

Toward Participatory Equality: Protecting Minority Rights under International Law

The principal claim made by this Article is that the realization of full and effective equality for all citizens and residents within a multi-ethnic state requires “participatory equality.” Creating a system of participatory equality entails, for most states, making drastic and fundamental changes to the state's legal system, public spaces, social and economic structures, and funding and space provided for ethnic, cultural, and religious institutions; however, this type of transformation is the only means of respecting human dignity and ensuring peace. This claim is first made as a normative moral claim based on principles of justice and dignity; as this Paper will show, a broad and effective interpretation of international law concerning minority rights supports the same normative claim.This Article first reviews existing international law and other legal frameworks regarding national minority rights, including discussions of the specific case of indigenous peoples'rights and the intersection between individual and collective rights. The bulk of the Paper proposes a universal model, building upon existing legal frameworks, for building participatory equality for all members of a society, which requires the full and equal sharing of its resources in three primary domains: the public, the internal, and the historical domain. The need for such a model is all the more so for indigenous and minority groups of substantial size living under systems that cater to a majority based on ethnicity, religion, race or other dominant traits. Only when a nation's legal system secures the rights of all citizens to share equally in all of these domains can that nation fulfill the purpose of international minority rights legal bodies and deliver substantive equality to majority and minority concerns, both in law and practice.

National Cultural Autonomy and International Minority Rights Norms

Debates about the treatment of ethnocultural minorities are a familiar feature of the domestic political life of many countries in Central and Eastern Europe. But these debates are not solely domestic. The international community plays an increasingly important role in shaping these debates, endorsing some models of the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity while discouraging others. The long-term prospects for national-cultural autonomy (NCA), therefore, may depend on whether it is endorsed by influential international organizations, either as a “best practice” or “minimum standard”. This article examines the attitudes of European organizations towards NCA. While NCA has not played an important role to date in the thinking of these organizations, some important actors have called for more systematic study of its potential benefits and risks. Whether European organizations adopt norms and standards promoting NCA will depend on the prior question of which minorities are seen as the intended beneficiaries of these norms and standards, and this in turn depends on unresolved questions about the underlying motivations and goals for formulating international minority rights norms in the first place.

The Rights of 'Old' versus 'New' Minorities

International minority rights law is law in making. Important developments took place during the last decade of the twentieth century, but many issues remain vague and uncharted. One of the stumbling blocks has been disagreement on whether so-called 'new' minorities should be included, and whether they should have same rights as the 'old' minorities. This chapter addresses that issue de lege ferenda (how the law should be, i.e. to which extent should minority protection extend to new minorities?). A second, related question is by which criteria one should separate the 'old' from the 'new'. The chapter illustrates the provisions of United Nations Declaration of Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (UNDeclMin). To be a minority, old as well as the new must be numerically inferior to dominant majority in country, and share common ethnic, religious or linguistic features which they want to preserve. Keywords: 'new' minorities; 'old' minorities; de lege ferenda ; International minority rights law; UNDeclMin