Minority Rights As a Branch of Human Rights

Within the last decades minority rights have become one of the most controversial notions in the domain of human rights. The term is loaded with political aspirations, and it has become a symbol of rhetorically projected positions of the adversaries in the debate. But, regardless of academic/ideological/political standpoints, one can hardly deny the gravity of the problem: many among contemporary polities are heterogeneous, that is decisively marked by parallel existence of different ethnic, religious, cultural groups. These polities are thus "naturally", i.e. pre-politically divided into majorities and minorities. Given the intensity of the group affiliation, and given that the identification with the primary group tends toward the translation in the world of politics, such communities are often marked by deep inter-group conflicts. Since members of non-titular nations in plural societies are "destined" to remain in a minority position, the problem of human rights in such a context gets special connotations. To look for morally defensible, legally efficient and politically feasible concept of minority rights, is one of the most important challenges facing contemporary democracies. Many recent examples of ethnically based violence in plural societies only confirm the importance of establishing the right measure of minority rights, because this is what divides multicultural co-existence from ethnicity- legitimized majoritarian oppression. The objective of the course would be to explore this complex theme by combining different, yet closely related methodological approaches: legal and political philosophy, constitutional law, international law, sociology, and political science. We hope that the proposed course would both meet the goals of the SUN and contribute to the development of the CEU, which are objectives that, in our understanding, are to be equaled to the development of open, democratic societies in post-communist states. More specifically, we are planning to bring together scholars from the whole region (as well as a number of scholars from the Western countries) and to discuss - guided by principles of tolerance and mutual respect, through an ideologically and politically undistorted communication - the capacities of those who are different to live together without violating neither human freedom, nor specific group identities. Main topics of the course 1) Nation(s) and Community: How are Multinational States Possible 2) Individual versus Collective Rights 3) Position of Minority Rights Within the Realm of Human Rights 4) The international and the European Framework of the Minority Rights 5) Various forms of Minority Autonomies in Europe 6) Case Study: Stable Democracies and "Uncertain" Democracies: the Workshop on the Minority Rights in Romania and Macedonia.