Racial Discrimination, Minorities and Indigenous Peoples

The interconnected topics of racial discrimination, minorities, and indigenous peoples count among the most dynamic areas of contemporary human rights law. They are also complex and challenging in that they raise questions of universalism and locality, individual and collective rights, and how human rights discourses engage with cultural diversity.

One paradigmatic ‘universalist’ approach to ethnic questions is represented by standards prohibiting racial discrimination, including the influential International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and its monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Contrasting with this universal approach, standards on minority rights address the claims of particular groups over a limited range of rights, though it must also be borne in mind that minorities and indigenous peoples, additionally to their specific rights, enjoy the full protection of general human rights. Despite their long history as part of international law, minority rights are absent (at least by name) from the UN Charter and the UDHR, but have regained a place in international law, particularly since the end of the Cold War through instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. 

The rights of indigenous peoples also represented a neglected sphere in human rights law but have been invigorated through, inter alia, the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the adoption in 2007 by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the adoption in 2016 by the OAS of the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as through recognition of indigenous rights in the practice of UN human rights ‘treaty bodies’. Minority rights are often said to occupy an intermediate position between ‘purely’ individual rights, and full collective or group rights, a contention that will be analysed in our seminars. Indigenous rights, on the other hand, are clearer on their overall collective/group focus, presenting challenges regarding their relationship to individual human rights, as well as raising practical questions in areas such as self-determination, rights to lands, territories and mineral resources, development, participation, and ‘free, prior and informed consent’.

The course aims to provide participants with an overview of the instruments, institutions, norms and concepts relevant to the three areas above, mindful of their interconnections and their setting in the broader framework of human rights law. As we work through the materials, participants should develop the ability to conceptualise key questions relating to ethnicity and identity, as well as analyse and interpret the leading texts in their context. Through this process, we learn to understand the potential (and limits) of normative regulation in the management of ethnic and indigenous questions, bearing in mind the poet MacNeice’s verdict on the ‘incorrigibly plural’ nature of the world we inhabit.

Tutor: Prof Castellino or Prof Xanthaki