Drawing Inspiration from the udhr: Lessons about Understanding the Role of Law in Protecting Minority Rights

Abstract

The strong edifice of minority protection that existed during the League of Nations was unable to stop the mass atrocities against minorities that were a central feature of World War Two. Chastened by this experience, minority rights, which had hitherto been a strong bulwark around which human rights itself evolved, were given less prominence under the United Nations system that began to emerge in the mid-1940s. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has no explicit acknowledgment of minorities, instead implicitly positing that ensuring the rights of all trumped the need to recognise the specific needs of particular groups. In the seventy-five years since its passage however minority rights law has emerged, drawing strength from the principles of human rights as articulated in the UDHR to form a strong part of the legal platform protecting rights across the world. While minority rights law draws sustenance from the growth of the human rights movement itself, it also offers insights into the limitations of that regime in overcoming ossified structural discrimination. In this chapter the authors track this issue, presenting a critique concerning the extent to which law was envisaged as a founding platform through which societies could be regulated. The piece is divided into three short parts. The first seeks to draw attention to how minority rights were perceived around the time of the framing of the UDHR; the second aims to highlight the emergence of what could be identified in broad terms as a regime for minority rights protection that draws direct inspiration from the nondiscrimination principle contained in the UDHR; while the third emphasizes how such regimes have been unable to guarantee the rights of marginalized communities. The piece ends with a brief commentary on the type of renewal that would be necessary, seventy-five years after the UDHR, of its true essence: the generation of societies where the individual and collective dignities and inherent worth of communities could be recognised