A/75/211 has been narrowed down to four specific categories of beneficiaries within a State ’s territory: national or ethnic, religious and linguistic. These are the particular groupings at the global level that are deemed to require specific attention and protection as minorities. 27. The above description obviously omits the complex processes, negotiations and compromises that have always been fundamental to the eventual emergence of commitments characteristic of international instruments. There is also of course the reality that the categories may be viewed in different ways in each State or even within one State by different groups, particularly those belonging to the distinct national or ethnic, religious and linguistic communities themselves. Certain political and legal traditions may have long-standing approaches to the concept of minorities, or its rejection, or its limitation to “ethnic” or “national” groups; others tend to refer more broadly to nationalities since it can encompass majorities as well as minorities; others may consider minorities as an offensive description in itself; and still others may consider all populations to be indigenous, thus rendering the concept of minorities inappropriate. 28. In addition, at the international and regional levels, treaty provisions may have different wording and intents, and omissions, uncertainties or ambiguities are therefore not infrequent between different treaties that deal with similar issues. 29. This is also true in relation to “minority rights” since the end of the First World War, which have had a considerable and continuing impact on the modern formulation of the human rights of minorities at the United Nations, in particular the bifurcation between “national minorities” or “ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities”. It also explains in part why most European States continue to refer mainly to “national minorities”, whereas the United Nations system has since the Second World War tended to privilege the concept of “ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities”. 11 1. Significance and scope of beneficiaries in United Nations instruments 30. The contextualization of the emergence of four categories of minority beneficiaries in United Nations treaties and declarations, in particular those of UNESCO, over decades presents a diversity of views and approaches to the concept of minorities. Most submissions to the Special Rapporteur from European States, for example, seemed to focus on “national minorities”, at times equating the category with “ethnic” and, less frequently, including linguistic minorities. 12 Many of those submissions confirmed that religious minorities were generally not considered to fall within the category of “national minorities”. There is also a tendency in European circles to consider “minorities” as automatically meaning “national minorities”, explaining why treaties and other instruments of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe refer to “national minorities” __________________ 11 12 8/20 A detailed historical outline, contained in Annex III, is available at: www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Minorities/SR/Historical_outline.docx. There is a continuing debate, mainly in Europe, as to whether recent more migrants can constitute national minorities, or whether European treaties, such as the Framework Convention for National Minorities only extend to “traditional” national minorities. On the one hand, the Advisory Committee of the Framework Convention has suggested an inclusive approach, and that, in the absence of a definition, the Parties must examine the personal scope of application to be given t o the Framework Convention within their country. On the other hand, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages defines minority languages as being “traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than t he rest of the State’s population”. In addition, most States parties to the Framework Convention either made distinctions between “traditional” national minorities and “recent migrants” in declarations when ratifying the Framework Convention, in their own definitions, or list those the y considered “national minorities”, while some indicate that, in order to be “traditional” enough, persons belonging to a minority must have been living within their territories for at least 100 years. Only a few suggest migrants can be national minorities under this treaty. 20-09835