A significant proportion of the situations in which transitional justice claims have been made have affected minorities and/or indigenous peoples, including Guatemala, Peru, Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and the Sudan. These claims have covered massive and systematic violations such as population displacement, rape, cultural assimilation, and genocide. It is of interest to explore how the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples (MIPs) may be – and in some cases have been – articulated to strengthen such claims for transitional justice, and to produce outcomes in transitional justice processes that contribute to more effective and sustainable justice and reconciliation. Furthermore, the MIP rights framework may further a subsidiary objective of transitional justice – the quest for a more just and inclusive society, in which the chance of a repetition of past abuses becomes more remote.

THE RIGHTS OF MINORITIES AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Minority rights protections were developed to respond to situations involving religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire and tensions between countries containing minorities and neighboring countries to which those minorities bore ethnic affiliation (“kin-states”), particularly during the interwar period. In 1948, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as a number of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”