minorities in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Instruments on discrimination such as ICERD also gradually altered their universalist perspective through increasing concern with minority issues, even if ‘minority’ is not named in its text. The same is now true of leading human rights conventions in the UN system and in the work of regional bodies. Mechanisms have accompanied or followed the widening of concerns, including the Special Rapporteur on Minority issues and this Forum. The treatment of minorities is a major concern of the United Nations, expressed through dedicated instruments connected to a matrix of human rights standards, instruments and procedures. The Concept Note recalls the new impetus given to UN efforts to address minority issues after tragic events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (UNDM) emerged in 1992 and is the background instrument that animates and informs the proceedings of this Forum. It addresses individual rights with collective dimensions. The existence of minorities is a question of fact to be recognised and acted upon, and we also note in this and related contexts the emergence of the eminently rights-based notion of self-definition. The Forum takes the minorities referred to in the UNDM as the basis of its work, adding to this the spectrum of groups implicated in the ‘grounds’ of discrimination in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination - race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin - and without distinction as to citizenship. Although the Concept Note has already made the point, it is worth recalling the key principles of the UNDM of protection of the existence and identity of minorities, equal rights and non-discrimination, and the right of persons belonging to minorities to participate not only in ‘cultural, religious, social, economic and public life’, but also in decisions affecting them. This is not a narrow range of issues but one that expresses in concise language a wide spectrum of rights that are absolutely basic as well as ongoing. They implicate protection from physical, psychological and cultural destruction as well as underscoring the democratic right of participation and active contribution to the national community. Members of minorities are entitled to enjoy all human rights, as are all human beings; they also have specific claims on our attention. Perhaps this last point needs explaining as well as emphasising. The reasons for attention on minorities are not simply conceptual or abstract, but are eminently practical. Minorities, in view of their non-dominant situation, are paradigmatic victims of human rights violations, whether suffered in situations of armed conflict or more widely. The forms of minority oppression are legion, from hate speech through subtle and less subtle forms of discrimination up to genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ the last is an unfortunate term that seems to stick like a limpet to the international lexicon, and suggests that only mono-ethnic regions are ‘clean’. We should treat it like ‘racial discrimination’: to combat the latter, we do not need to believe in separate human races; to combat ‘ethnic cleansing’ we should strenuously insist, against the totem of mono-ethnicity, on the richness of experience that diversity brings to all of us.