What next 30 years after the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Minorities?
Last week I attended for the first time the UN Forum on Minority Issues. This is an annual meeting, now in its fifteenth year. I had previously attended sessions of its predecessor, the UN Working Group on Minorities, and was impressed by what I saw at the fifteenth session of the Forum. The current UN…
Northern Ireland Census 2021
So the results of Census 2021 in Northern Ireland have now been released. This coincided with some reflections on a call for papers focusing on the relationship between the protection of minority rights and conflict resolution and prevention. Here the experiences of Northern Ireland seem to have little to offer to the debate. Yes, both the Council of…
A new season….
So it has been quite a while since I posted on here. This does not mean that I have stopped thinking about minority rights as I continue in my role as Director of Teaching and Learning within the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. My current thoughts and reflections have…
Why the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities Matters
I started this blog in part to air some of my frustrations at the limitations and ambiguities embedded within the European minority rights framework. However, I am not a minority rights sceptic. I became interested in minority rights acutely aware of what can happen when minority rights are not respected, and are indeed sometimes trampled…
Some Good Friday Refections
Good Friday has always been one of my favourite days of the year, a day of quiet and reflection, but also a day I tend to associate with Spring flowers, longer days and with the prospect of better days (and weather) ahead. From Good Fridays past spent in my Nana’s childhood home in Donegal, then…
Why Reflections and Surmises?
It was over twenty years ago that I first started working on minority rights and was introduced to the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Apparently this was an instrument that had caught the attention of some of those involved in discussions over the Good Friday Agreement 1998 and the…
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Minority Rights - Reflections and Surmises 