Kasra Mofarah

in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos (January1994)

The concept of the rights of peoples was first formulated at the time of American independence and the French revolution. The very principle was formulated at international level during the First World War by the President of the United States, W. Wilson. The right of peoples to self-determination first appeared through the question of nationality, which was seen as a fundamental principle of civil liberties and international law.
However, it was not until the creation of the United Nations that this principle was extended and really put into practice (see the 1945 Charter: the preamble and the chapters devoted to dependent peoples). The United Nations set up a Trusteeship Council to prepare certain non-self-governing territories for independence. On 14 December 1960, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was adopted. Numerous other resolutions, adopted under pressure from liberation movements, would accelerate the decolonisation process. At individual rather than collective level, in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out to combat racial, linguistic, ethnic, religious or any other form of discrimination (art. 2). At the request of Yugoslavia, this article was extended to independent and non-independent peoples.
The right of peoples to self-determination then mainly covered decolonisation and the right to external self-determination, i.e. independence. As the number of new States increased, the content of the right of peoples expanded to include the right to political (at international and internal level), economic, cultural and social self-determination.
In 1976 in Algiers, a group of leading figures adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples. This “Charter” expands on all the rights of peoples and seeks to place peoples, as subjects of law, at the centre of a new and utopian legal system, in opposition to a hypocritical international law in which the State is the sole sovereign representative of peoples.
Many international political analysts regard 1989 as the last wave of decolonisation. Indeed, the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Empire brought about a thaw and the end of half a century of domination. Since 1989, Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia have freed themselves from the Empire, and peoples seeking autonomy are searching for their territories and their limits.
In the rest of the world, global problems such as successive economic crises, impoverishment, employment shortages, underdevelopment and ecological threats are on the increase, making the future of humanity a cause for concern. Population movements and the global communication system have led to an identity crisis. Borders are disappearing in Germany, Yemen and Europe. New ones are reappearing in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia and perhaps Italy or Belgium. Can we uphold the sacrosanct principles of international law – the inviolability of borders and territorial integrity – in such a context? You would have to, because they protect the sovereignty of the State as the right of internal self-determination of the people or the dismemberment of the State, but a certain flexibility must be necessary. Indeed, the very concept of the nation-state is in crisis, and the citizen who holds a piece of national sovereignty remains powerless in many areas, including international life. Moreover, the citizen is defined primarily by opposition to the foreigner. In France, for example, the political incapacity of foreigners remains an absolute rule; elsewhere, minorities, indigenous peoples or different ethnic groups are often considered as foreigners.
In the current context of identity withdrawal, it would therefore seem necessary to rethink a ‘new citizenship’ at three levels that is appropriate to the Community entity, respects the intangibility of borders and responds to global, international and humanitarian needs.
Does the ‘duty to interfere’ also illustrate the adaptation of the law to the rapid changes taking place at the end of this century? But this adaptation depends first and foremost on political will.
The current unblocking of the Israeli-Palestinian situation is clear proof of the decisive role of political will, whereas the law has long been established in this area.
The right of peoples is therefore, if anything, a highly topical issue. Another example is the UN’s designation of 1993 as the Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. An international conference on human rights, and to a large extent on minorities, was held under the aegis of the UN in Vienna in June 1993. This conference highlighted the difficulty of defining not only the entities subject to international law but also their rights. These problems of definition are extremely serious in the case of the Yugoslav conflict, a conflict in which international law and the rights of peoples, taken at face value, lead to a dead end.

Mofarah, Kasra
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos (January1994)