The Legal Theory of Minority Rights (Minority Groups and Their Members: International Judicial Protection of Rights Based on Ethnicity, Religion, and Language)

Author: Zhou Yong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-04-01
Features: "Preserving a society that accommodates a minority and multiple cultures and ethnic groups peacefully is one of the most important issues in contemporary world politics. The United Nations and various regional international organizations are widely discussing and regulating this issue. This book is very important in drawing people's attention to the extensive work done by the international community on this topic. It is very important to study how different countries' governments formulate corresponding domestic policies and legal systems on minority issues based on the standards established by the United Nations and regional organizations. I believe Mr. Zhou Yong's research will make outstanding contributions to advancing this work." Asbj?rn Eide, Chairman of the United Nations Working Group on Minorities
Group rights and individual freedom are another pair of highly controversial topics when discussing the legitimacy of minority rights. Before specifically examining the relationship between the two, it is necessary to define the meaning of these two terms in the following text to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings and confusion caused by conceptual ambiguities. First, regarding group rights. The classification of rights has different standards: to clarify the meaning of group rights, two categories of rights must be distinguished: one is the division of rights according to the subject, which includes rights enjoyed by individuals and rights enjoyed by specific groups through their representative organizations; the other is the division of rights according to the justification of their claims, which includes rights enjoyed by individuals as human beings, rights enjoyed by individuals as members of certain groups, and rights enjoyed by individuals with certain characteristics and identities as a collective group. The most easily confused or prone to terminological ambiguity here are the rights enjoyed by individuals based on their membership in a group (individual rights), the rights that individuals need to exercise together with others (individual rights), and the rights that are enjoyed by the group, the justification and exercise of which can only be viewed as a whole (group rights). In this article, "group rights" are limited to the meaning of rights enjoyed by a collective group with certain characteristics and identities as a whole. Secondly, regarding individual freedom. In the following discussion, the author understands "individual freedom" as personal rights centered on the right to self-preservation (survival) and the right to self-realization (developing one's personality according to one's own life plan). Group rights pose a new challenge to traditional human rights protection mechanisms and the design of ideal states by classical political theorists, because these group rights were not included in previous designs and established mechanisms, and the realization of these group rights also faces a series of technical difficulties. Taking the right to representative rights of a group as an example, if it is claimed that a minority group lacks sufficient representation in public institutions and affairs, and thus needs to be granted corresponding representative rights as a remedy, then these difficulties at least include the following aspects: First, how to determine the group to be represented. Here, determining whether a minority group is subjected to institutionalized adverse treatment in the social and political process and thus needs measures to grant it corresponding group representative rights involves a series of complex issues, including the identification and confirmation of the group; second, the formation of the will of the group. Here, it is particularly important how the group internally forms a representative body recognized by all its members; third, which social public institutions this group should have representative seats in, and how many seats or proportions should it occupy. Taking the representative of the legislative body as an example, the typical theory of "mirror representation" for special group representative rights is that the legislative body, as an institution representing the will of the general public, must reflect the ethnic, gender, or class characteristics of the public, and therefore, as an appropriate proportional standard, the proportion of different group representatives in the legislative body should be roughly equivalent to the proportion of the group's population in the total population. However, this theory