A/75/211 be a member of an indigenous minority. On the specific issue of determining whether Mr. Kitok was a person who “belonged”, the Human Rights Committee expressed concerns that the legislation contained criteria by which a person who is ethnically a Sami could be held not to be a Sami for the purposes of the legislation, and essentially pointed out that a State could not ignore objective ethnic criteria in determining membership of a minority (including links with the Sami community and a lways living on Sami lands) and distinguishing this issue from distinct matters of what activities could be carried out by individuals who belong to a minority. 43. The third and final overarching issue involves whether a person can be said to belong to a national, ethnic, religious or linguistic minority that has no official recognition or status. In other words, can a person belong, for example, to a linguistic or religious minority that does not officially “exist” in a State? In a number of countries, certain religious minority groups are not acknowledged as distinct from the majority, or are even considered as apostates, and therefore are refused legal status that would allow them to operate openly or to conduct some of their religious ceremonies or acti vities. This can be the case for groups such as Baha’is or Ahmadis in some countries, or for atheists or humanists in others. Other States may not acknowledge that particular languages are distinct from the majority language: Kurdish and Tamazight, for exa mple, were for long periods of time considered relatives or dialects of Turkish or Arabic. Others, such as Corsican, Breton and Basque, were considered “patois” or bastardized forms of French, Italian or Spanish. One could also point to the fact that, unti l recently, authorities had long been ambivalent in the treatment of sign languages as “real” languages. The denial of any official recognition or status of a culture, religion or language cannot be such that it impairs a person’s ability to belong. According to the Human Rights Committee, if a distinct culture, religion or language is objectively demonstrable, then a person can assert a claim to “belong” to it, even in the absence of official sanction. 15 44. The above contextualization and general observations provide a framework to better address the specific scope and significance of the four ca tegories of beneficiaries that the United Nations instruments recognize. Each has its own challenges and requires conceptual clarifications in order to address occasional uncertainties or confusion in order to ensure the protection of all of the world ’s national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. 2. Linguistic minorities 45. A linguistic group is a minority if the language it speaks is not that of the majority in a State. It does not need to be a traditional language, have a written form, a threshold number of speakers or to be officially recognized or granted some form of status or acknowledgment. It is an objective determination of whether or not, in a State, a linguistic minority “exists”. 46. That simple description still raises a number of issues. In some States, only a “traditional” language can be considered a minority language. Alternatively, it might be that an “official language” cannot also be at the same time a “minority language”. 16 __________________ 15 16 12/20 See CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5, para. 5.2: “The existence of an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority in a given State party does not depend upon a decision by that State party but requires to be established by objective criteria.” See for example, Explanatory Report to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, available from https://rm.coe.int/16800cb5e5, which explains, in its para. 31, that the definition in article 1 of the Charter excludes non-traditional or non-territorial languages and languages used by non-citizens, and leaves it to the discretion of State authorities to determine what constitutes a separate language, a restrictive crit erion that in practice results in the exclusion of a not insignificant number of languages from the purview of the treaty. 20-09835