Resolution on the Rights of Minorities
As adopted by the Congress of Liberal International, Budapest, Hungary 21-23 March 2002
Noting with gratitude The Declaration: The Rights of Minorities, prepared by an international experts’ group of the Liberal Institute of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and adopted by a conference of representatives of 38 minorities from 26 countries, this Congress particularly stresses the following propositions and proposals contained in the said report:
No society and no country can be termed a liberal democracy that does not acknowledge, implement and respect the human rights and the rights of minorities. Liberals hold individual liberty supreme. Decentralisation will provide reliable guidance to safeguarding the legitimate interests of minorities and majorities alike. Where entrenched inequalities exist there is the need for specific measures to safeguard minority rights.
This requires, in the first place, strong individual human rights for members of minorities, but also rights and provisions related to groups rather than individuals, even though they ultimately serve the rights of their individual members and must in no case infringe them. Thus, minority group rights may never put individual rights at the disposal of the group, whatever the particular community may be. Group rights may never be used as a disguised form of discrimination.
All measures proposed by this resolution are designed to promote harmony between various communities within a country by ensuring that nobody is either privileged or discriminated against because he or she belongs to a certain community.
Belonging to a minority group is a matter between the individual and the minority as a group, with self-determination of the individual as the main guideline, subject to internationally recognised human rights standards.
Minority rights promote a pluralistic society in which the members of different groups treat each other with mutual respect and dignity, and are willing to learn from and about each other.
Societies must understand that loyalty cannot be won by controlling minorities as tightly as possible, but only by giving them a chance to determine their own destiny. Trusting the people, which is at the heart of liberal democracy, must not be allowed to stop where people are different from oneself. Only if this diversity is perceived as enrichment and not as threat, will different peoples/groups be able to live peacefully and harmoniously within one country.
Building a tolerant society is the responsibility of minorities and majorities alike.
Ethnocultural minorities consist of immigrants and refugees and their descendants who are living, on a more than transitional basis, in another country than that of their origin. This includes but is not limited to:
National minorities are historically settled communities which have a distinct language and/or culture of their own. Every national minority is entitled to its own identity: its culture. Cultural self-determination means that everybody has the unrestricted right to his or her own native language
This includes unconditionally:
Members of national minorities have a right to be educated in their own language.
This implies:
To indigenous peoples, all characteristics of national minorities apply, but their additional and distinguishing characteristic consists in their having been settled in the land prior to the majority, and having become a minority by conquest and/or colonisation.
Indigenous peoples’ rights include all the rights previously stipulated in this resolution. Indigenous peoples have a right to maintain and develop their own specific cultures, traditions, histories and philosophies.
In accordance with these principles, this Congress recommends the Declaration “The Rights of Minorities” to the attention of all liberal parties, politicians and individuals and decides to forward it to the appropriate bodies of the relevant international organisations, in particular the United Nations, for consideration.
