Abstract
In 1948, when the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it affirmed " that the United Nations cannot remain indifferent to the fate of minorities ". Nevertheless, it decided " not to deal with the question of minorities by means of a specific provision in the body of this Declaration ", " [c]onsidering that it is difficult to adopt a uniform solution to this complex and delicate question, which takes on particular aspects in each State where it arises ". In 1995, Article 1 of the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities - the only plurilateral treaty on minority rights - states that " [t]he protection of national minorities and of the rights and freedoms of persons belonging to those minorities forms an integral part of the international protection of human rights [...] ". In this seminar, Prof. Levrat will examine existing ways of reconciling the universal dimension with the necessary regional variations - i.e. both supranational (such as the Council of Europe or the African Union) and sub-national (such as India's federal structure or regionalization in Spain), thus addressing the dual dimension of the concept of regionalization of the rights of persons belonging to minorities. He outlines a possible multiscalar minority law, both plural and universal, exploring the shores of a pluralistic dimension to human rights protection.
