A/78/195 V. Moving forward: a look to the past for the future 67. As the Special Rapporteur highlighted in his previous reports to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/52/27) and to the General Assembly (A/77/246), the visibility of the rights of minorities has not progressed at the international level for years, even decades. The rights of minorities have languished in the United Nations system, as other marginalized or vulnerable groups have increasingly been recognized and have become the subjects of legally binding treaties and various institutional entities and supporting initiatives. Recent decades have seen a decreasing interest in minority issues, with no major institutional initiatives for the protection of the rights of minorities, while initiatives have increased significantly for other marginalized or vulnerable groups, such as Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, migrants, women and children (ibid.). 68. While the Secretary-General acknowledged in 2022 that the track record of the United Nations and the international community was one of “outright inaction and negligence in the protection of minority rights”, any steps to redress that situat ion still remain woefully absent or almost invisible, including in more recent initiatives, such as the New Agenda for Peace and the new campaign being formulated to combat statelessness – two areas where minority issues should be prioritized, since minori ty grievances or the targeting of minorities are to be found in most cases of armed conflict and statelessness. 69. Whether owing to institutional inertia, ignorance or outright hostility, the fact remains that there are too many situations where the very word “minority” has been expunged from United Nations documents, or where United Nations officials and others have been reluctant to acknowledge, and at times even hostile to admitting, the presence of particular minorities, or where the language used is s anitized to avoid referring to a group as a minority, instead preferring terms such as “groups”, “communities”, “populations”, “peoples” or “racial groups”, or even just referring to the region or the name of a particular minority, but never referring to t hem as a minority. The perverse result is often that many matters may involve minorities, including especially religious or belief minorities or linguistic minorities, but the coded or toned-down reference to them makes their particular vulnerability, the targeting of them or the denial of their rights less obvious or visible. 70. The Special Rapporteur is of the view that the difficult contexts for minorities globally and at the United Nations create a propitious moment to complete the efforts begun in the 1990s, which first led to a drive to acknowledge and address minority rights at the United Nations and in many regions of the world. It was the widespread armed conflicts and instability in Europe and elsewhere that brought the need to protect the human rights of minorities sharply into focus and led to the adoption of a plethora of instruments and measures in Europe and at the United Nations, such as the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of 1994, the adoption in 1993 of the Copenhagen criteria for eligibility to join the European Union, which included stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities, the creation in 1992 of the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe High Commissioner on National Minorities as an early warning and early action conflict prevention mechanism in regard to tensions involving national minority issues that had the potential to develop into a conflict within the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe area, affecting peace, stability or relations between participating States, 34 and of course the __________________ 34 23-15818 Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE Helsinki Document: The Challenges of Change (1992), para. 23. 17/21