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30 Neth. Q. Hum. Rts. 3 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/nethqur45 and id is 1 raw text is: COLUMN ILZE BRANDS KEHRIS As various minority rights related anniversaries are coming up now at the beginning of the second decade of the 211t century, it is appropriate, as one does on those occasions, to take stock of related developments and reflect on present and upcoming challenges. It has been twenty years since the creation of two specific minority rights instruments - firstly the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which set out legal norms, and secondly the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), which aims to address shortcomings in the protection of national minorities. During those past twenty years, a great diversity of views have been expressed on the adequacy and even the relevance of this developing system of minority rights, which has focused on national minorities and for which the impetus was largely the threat to peace and stability in the processes and aftermath of the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav Federation. The question can then be legitimately posed whether the system that has emerged continues to be the right path to follow for the protection of minorities in Europe's multi-ethnic societies and whether the norms that have been established can be sustained and progress can be made in developing them further and implementing them in practice. The arguments that minority rights are an integral part of human rights, and that democracy, rule of law and human rights are inevitably linked have become self- evident truths. In addition to the rights-based arguments the political imperative of democracy as the rule of the people, implying that government should be representative, participatory and accountable, also underlines the necessity of an equal role of all members of society, majority and minority alike. The rule of the majority has to be combined with safeguarding the interests of the minorities or else there is no democracy, nor can good governance be ensured. Regardless of the type of argument chosen and the discipline it emanates from, the recognition that using majority position to ignore legitimate minority interests is abuse of power and as such unacceptable has become standard in both political contexts and courts of law. But if it is commonplace to argue that minorities must have equal say in our societies and polities, the question of whether this is to be achieved by ensuring respect for specific minority rights or by other means is far less clear. Challenges to the very conceptualisation and rationale behind minority rights as the rights of persons belonging to national minorities should be taken seriously not only as an intellectual duel, but ultimately for ensuring the effectiveness of the approach in achieving the aim itself. An argument frequently heard against the rights of national minorities is that the groups included are supposedly narrowly defined and end up being unduly privileged Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol 30/1, 4 10, 2012. © Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Printed in the Netherlands. 3

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