- published: 27 Aug 2013
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The term "minority rights" embodies two separate concepts: first, normal individual rights as applied to members of racial, ethnic, class, religious, linguistic or sexual minorities, and second, collective rights accorded to minority groups. The term may also apply simply to individual rights of anyone who is not part of a majority decision.
Civil rights movements often seek to ensure that individual rights are not denied on the basis of membership in a minority group.
There are many political bodies which also feature minority group rights. This might be seen in affirmative action quotas, or in guaranteed minority representation in a consociational state.
Minority rights were codified in Austrian law in 1867. Minority rights, as applying to ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples, are an integral part of international human rights law. Like children's rights, women's rights and refugee rights, minority rights are a legal framework designed to ensure that a specific group which is in a vulnerable, disadvantaged or marginalised position in society, is able to achieve equality and is protected from persecution. The first post-war international treaty to protect minorities, designed to protect them from the greatest threat to their existence, was the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.
In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.
Justin Pierre James Trudeau, MP (born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician. He has represented the Montreal electoral division of Papineau in the Canadian House of Commons since 2008 as a member of the Liberal Party and currently serves as the party's critic for youth, post-secondary education, and amateur sport.
Trudeau is the eldest son of the late former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair Trudeau Kemper. His maternal grandfather, James Sinclair, was also a federal cabinet minister.
Trudeau was born on December 25, 1971, in Ottawa, Ontario. He was only the second child in Canadian history to be born when one of his parents was prime minister; the first was John A. Macdonald's youngest daughter Margaret Mary Macdonald, and Trudeau's younger brothers Alexandre (Sacha) (born December 25, 1973) and Michel (1975–98) were the third and fourth, respectively. Pierre and Margaret Trudeau separated in 1977, when Justin was six years old, and Pierre retired as prime minister in 1984. Of his mother and father's marriage, Trudeau said in 2009, "They loved each other incredibly, passionately, completely. But there was 30 years between them and my mom never was an equal partner in what encompassed my father's life, his duty, his country."