Collective Rights of Minorities (Natalia Katko)

Раздел "Международное право", рубрика "Права человека"The article deals with one of the most relevant problems of modern international law, i. e. collective rights, in particular, with the collective rights of minorities and their interrelation with individual rights. Despite the fact that the concept of collective rights was given legal provision for as far back as the UN Charter and later in such legal instruments as the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and at the regional level — in the 1981. African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights, it has not been given the appropriate regulation in international law. Collective rights (the right of the people, the right of a nation, the right of a community or an association) are not natural rights for they are shaped and crystallized alongside with the emergence of the interests of a certain group. They cannot be regarded as a sum of the rights of individuals belonging to a certain community. Nevertheless, however various these rights may be, their validity must be justified by the dimension of individual rights. Collective rights should not ignore human rights or contradict and suppress them (except for the situations of emergency which threaten the life of a nation or a people). If the collective rights lead to the infringement of the rights of an individual, it means that the aimsconsolidating this group are not humane or legal. Nowadays economic and social rights such as the right to peace and security, to healthy environment have become as much unalienable human rights as the political or civil rights. These rights can be attained only through ensuring collective rights of the ethnic groups who are their bearers. Ethnic minorities are a part of the nation living on the territory of another state which determines their collective rights being of a special nature, different from the collective rights of the titular ethnos. The main collective right for minorities is the right to ethnic identity, to being different from others, the right to existence and the right to autonomy, as well as the collateral right to proportional representation in parliaments and local government. It also presupposes the recognition of the right to use their mother-tongue as the official language and establishment of their own cultural and educational institutions. International legal protection aims to preserve ethnic and cultural identity of minorities as a group, a community. The rights ensuring this protection must be of a collective character. It is the community that must have a right to identity for only it can possess the whole complex of ethnic, religious, linguistic features which make up an identity. Hence it is necessary for the new international documents, adopted to realize the protection of national minorities, to formulate and fix not only the rights of individuals belonging to a minority but the rights of the minorities themselves as ethnic entities which have needs and interests of their own and require legal instruments of their protection