Who Are The Minorities? The Role of the Right to Self-Identify within the European Minority Rights Framework

This article examines the implications of both individual and collective dimensions of the right to self-identify and reappraises the key challenges to its realisation. The article argues that the status of the right to self-identify as a fundamental right remains unclear, over a quarter of a century after its inclusion in the CSCE/OSCE Copenhagen Document in 1990. The article starts by revisiting some of the ‘justice-oriented’ arguments made in the early 1990s about the need for groupdifferentiated rights in order to highlight the importance of the right to self-identify as an integral part of the European minority rights framework. It then proceeds to argue that the case for giving greater prominence to this right is strengthened if the challenge of cosmopolitanism is also considered. The second part of the article is focused more specifically on the challenges to the realisation of the right, particularly the collective dimension. It argues that this can be attributed to the continued deference to States in relation to the scope of application of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and that there needs to be a greater focus on the internalisation of the right at the domestic level.