Introductory Remarks by Patrick Thornberry I wish to thank all concerned with this first Forum for the opportunity to introduce the draft recommendations. It is particularly gratifying to see in the room so many experts on the subject of education and minorities. Education has always been and continues to be one of the most strongly contested issues in the field of minority rights, certainly so through the era of the League of Nations and the United Nations. To the general principles of human rights developed from the time of the UN Charter, specific additions have been elaborated by the international community for the benefit of minorities. The general principles in the field of education and human rights have been advanced at the global level through a raft of instruments including, inter alia, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The work of UNESCO and UN special procedures including the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education has also been crucial to these developments. In the specific field of minorities, we have witnessed an expansion of the essential principles of equality and non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights to embrace a distinctive corpus of minority rights. The absence of specific reference to minorities in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not properly remedied until the emergence of the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education in 1960 and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966 - with its crucial Article 27 on rights of persons belonging to minorities. Further instruments followed, among which we may recall again the Convention on the Rights of the Child which adverts to the rights of children belonging to a minority and to children of indigenous origin. The UN Declaration on Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities includes the crucial components of education and language. In the neighbouring field of indigenous peoples, extensive reference to education is found in ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. This brief recapitulation of developments leaves much out of account, including notable standard-setting achievements at the regional level and much other UN work, but may suffice to introduce the complexity of texts to be subsumed under any draft recommendations on education and minorities. The work of synthesising the range of provisions is accordingly a difficult one, and not all the elements fit together easily. Other attempts at synthesising international provisions on education include such as the Hague Recommendations regarding the Educational Rights of National Minorities. All such exercises build upon a variety of disparate texts, blending the general with the specific. Education and language provisions figure prominently in texts on minorities. The depth of concern about such issues reflected in the various instruments suggests that deep intergenerational impulses are at work towards the conservation of group identity and traditions. The dominant themes in the texts on minorities are rights to existence and identity,