A/HRC/58/54 Committee of the Organization of American States, was requested to provide an opinion on the scope of the right to identity. This led to the adoption, in August 2007, of an opinion on the right to identity 51 in which the Committee considered that “the right to identity is indissolubly linked to the individual as such and consequently to the recognition of its jurisdictional personality”.52 Referring to article 8 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Committee specifies that “name, nationality, family relations and registration do not give rise to the right to identity, a right that pre-exists as an indissoluble part of the original dignity of people”.53 It explains that: “The right to identity cannot be mistaken for only one of its elements. In this matter, such a right cannot be reduced to any other right included in it…Nor can the right to identity be reduced to the mere sum of certain rights included in the Convention on the Right of the Child.”54 59. The Committee therefore concludes that the right to identity “is an autonomous right, whose existence is not subordinate to any other right, but is a right in itself”. 55 As a consequence, “depriving the right to identity or legal deficiencies in domestic legislation for its effective practice puts people in situations that hinder or prevent the enjoyment or access to basic rights, thus creating different treatments and opportunities that affect the principles of equality before the law and of non-discrimination”. 56 Thus, despite the absence of a specific provision recognizing a human right to identity in human rights law, the very concept of equality in dignity and right, as enshrined in article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, necessarily implies the existence of an individual right to identity in the human rights architecture. 3. The complex legal nature of minority identity 60. Minority identity results from the combined exercise of the specific right to identity by persons belonging to minorities and the recognition and protection from the State. It therefore seems indisputable that an individual right to identity derives from the very core of the conception of human rights, as a result of the equality in dignity and rights of all human beings, as enshrined in article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the existence of such an individual right to identity is indisputable, it remains to be seen how persons belonging to minorities may exert their right to identity in order to protect and even promote the identity of the minority group they belong to. First, it has to be acknowledged that this right to identity is largely based on self-identification, and not assigned identity, as the wording of article 8 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child shows. This view is shared by the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which pointed out that: “The right to free self-identification is central to minority protection, including multiple and situational affiliations. It must not be disregarded through imposed categorization based on predetermined characteristics. Individuals self-identify and form communities through a variety of evolving shared practices and through the common exercise of rights.”57 Self-identification as regards persons belonging to minorities, as is the case for gender identity, trumps assigned identity. 61. However, in contrast to gender identity, which is mostly a personal and individual matter, 58 self-identification of persons belonging to a minority is based on a relational 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 GE.25-00509 See Organization of American States, Inter-American Juridical Committee, document CJI/doc.276/07 rev.1. Ibid., para. 9. Ibid., para. 13. Ibid., paras. 14.1 and 14.2. Ibid., para. 18.3.1. Ibid., para. 17. Council of Europe, The Framework Convention: a key tool to managing diversity through minority rights – thematic commentary No. 4 on the scope of application of the Convention, document ACFC/56DOC(2016)001, p. 3. The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence of 11 May 2011 (also known as the Istanbul Convention) defines gender as “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men” (art. 3 (c)). There is interestingly the reference to social construction, but with the boolean assignation to only two categories, women or men. In the 13