Fourteenth Session of the Forum on Minority Issues, UN Human Rights Council Agenda Item 2. Root Causes of Contemporary Conflicts Involving Minorities Remarks of John Packer, Neuberger-Jesin Professor of International Conflict Resolution in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa Delivered virtually, 2 December 2021 Thank you Madam Chairperson, Special Rapporteur, Distinguished Delegates and Senior Officials, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is my honour and privilege to address you today, with the only regret that we could not be meeting in-person and exchanging conversations with so many representatives and advocates of groups for whom this subject is vital to their well-being and sometimes critical for their very existence. The root causes of contemporary conflicts involving minorities owe historical origin to phenomena and concepts long pre-dating the United Nations, pre-dating “human rights” and even pre-dating the idea of “minorities”. Indeed, the contemporary international rules-based order in large part derives from the Peace of Westphalia which in 1648 ended a century of war by establishing the principle of sovereign equality of States and the principle of religious tolerance. Those European wars were of course hardly philosophical. Rather, they were clashes of power amongst self-declared sovereigns dictating according to their presumed divine right. As for religion, the then prevailing norm was Cuius regio, eius religio – meaning “Whose realm, their religion”. Thus the ruler dictated, intolerant of any competing beliefs. The compelling logic of adopting religious tolerance was, simply, for the purpose of peace. The idea of a “minority” arose a century later in the context of parliamentary democracy and competition for power derived not from God, but from the majority of seats. Thus, the “majority rule” and its corresponding “minorities” who had to conform. In the 19th Century, notably in Europe, national or ethnic communities coalesced around political movements and formations generating the phenomenon of the “nation-State” for which nationalism was a dominant political project and source of power for so-called State-forming nations and the corresponding phenomenon of “national minorities”. In the late 19 th Century and first half of the 20th Century, this mixture of politics and competition for power spawned world wars and the Holocaust as well as its antecedents. In the Global South, decolonization followed sometimes with wars of national independence rife with inter-community – often inter-ethnic – conflicts. Only in these contexts did, first, the protection of minorities develop and, thereafter, the revolutionary regime of universal human rights, including minority rights. This new post Second World War paradigm is the one we have today, with some modest evolution – much more so in some regional contexts. The character of these contemporary conflicts remains substantially similar to the past with competitions for power, clashes of wills in relation to needs, interests and aspirations, a range of grievances and other recurrent issues – like non-discrimination and equality of treatment and opportunity, maintenance and development of identity, forms and degrees of self-governance, and ultimately the power to live freely with a measure of control over one’s life. These and other matters Page 1 of 2