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Concept
Minority rights
Summary
Minority rights are the normal individual rights as applied to members of racial, ethnic, class, religious, linguistic or gender and sexual minorities, and also the collective rights accorded to any minority group.
Civil-rights movements often seek to ensure that individual rights are not denied on the basis of membership in a minority group. Such civil-rights advocates include the global women's-rights and global LGBT-rights movements, and various racial-minority rights movements around the world (such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States).
Issues of minority rights intersect with debates over historical redress or over positive discrimination.
Prior to the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), the term "minority" primarily referred to political parties in national legislatures, not ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups. The Paris Conference has been attributed with coining the concept of minority rights and bringing prominence to it.
The issue of minority rights was first raised in 1814, at the Congress of Vienna, which discussed the fate of German Jews and especially of the Poles who were once again partitioned up. The Congress expressed hope that Prussia, Russia, and Austria would grant tolerance and protection to their minorities, which ultimately they disregarded, engaging in organized discrimination.
The 1856 Congress of Paris paid special attention to the status of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In Britain, William Gladstone made the massacres of Bulgarians by the Ottoman Empire a major campaign issue and demanded international attention. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 dealt with the status of Jews in Romania, especially, and also Serbia, and Bulgaria. On the whole, the 19th-century congresses failed to impose significant reforms.
The first minority rights were proclaimed and enacted by the revolutionary Parliament of Hungary in July 1849. Minority rights were codified in Austrian law in 1867.
Russia was especially active in protecting Orthodox Christians and Slavic peoples under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
Official source
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