(Linguistic) Human Rights and/or Security Policy

Abstract

Current international Human Rights obligations and language rights declarations have not proved particularly effective. For a crime against humanity a person may be sentenced to life imprisonment (e.g., Ratko Mladić for the Srebrenica massacre), but other perpetrators often go unpunished: for instance, most of those States which assimilate their linguistic minorities through submersion education programs. In his call for this conference, Professor György Andrássy urged us to find new arguments that might help to raise international language rights standards, and clarify the role of arguments in general. In this context I will address a wider issue: Does security policy pose a threat to minority language rights? These challenges have been highlighted by conflicts in Ukraine over the past five years. If the Council of Europe, the European Union, and NATO become complicit in Ukraine’s erosion of regional and minority languages, a precedent may be set whereby a linguistic minority can be deprived of the rights they previously enjoyed in their State. The example of Ukraine may be followed by other States in building homogeneous nation-states and could well lead to new conflicts in Europe. In this paper I will show that what has created a serious international conflict and paralysis in NATO could be handled quite straightforwardly by linguists.