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International Journal of Constitutional Law Advance Access originally published online on September 16, 2008
International Journal of Constitutional Law 2008 6(3-4):531-552; doi:10.1093/icon/mon019
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© The Author 2008. Oxford University Press and New York University School of Law. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

This article appears in the following International Journal of Constitutional Law issue: SYMPOSIUM: constitutionalism in an era of globalization and privatization [View the issue table of contents]

Minority rights in international law

Patrick Macklem*

* W. C. Graham Professor of Law, University of Toronto. Email: p.macklem{at}utoronto.ca


  Abstract

Why should international human rights law vest members of a minority community with rights that secure a measure of autonomy from the state in which they are located? Answers to this question typically rest on a commitment to the protection of certain universal attributes of human identity from the exercise of sovereign power. Minority protection thus operates on the assumption that religious, cultural, and linguistic affiliations are essential features of what it means to be human. This essay offers an alternative account of why minority rights possess international significance, one that trades less on the currency of religion, culture, and language and more on the value of international distributive justice. On this approach, international minority rights speak to wrongs that international law itself produces by organizing international political reality into a legal order. This account avoids the normative instabilities of attaching universal value to religious, cultural, and linguistic affiliation and, instead, challenges the international legal order to remedy pathologies of its own making.


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