The Capacity of International Law to Advance Ethnic or Nationality Rights Claims

In all areas of the globe, segments of humanity are clinging to bonds of race, language, religion, kinship, and custom, and are projecting those bonds into the political future. In all too many instances, recent events remind us, the interactive patterns of ethnic and national groupings are oppressed by structures of human organization grounded in the modern system of states. The native tribes of the American continents, the Quebecois, the Baltic peoples, the Eritreans, the Kurds, and the Basques are examples of groups that have been challenging the state structures that engulf them. Comprehensively formulated, claims of ethnic or nationality groups can be divided into two categories. One category corresponds to claims of nondiscrimination and equal treatment for the members of the group within the context of a larger social setting. Examples of such claims are in the civil rights movement that coalesced in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. International law has provided clear support for these claims. The nondiscrimination ideal has been firmly embedded and elaborated in major international legal instruments, such as the United Nations Charter,' the Universal Declaration of