Patrick Thornberry Closing Remarks
Thank you Madam Chairman.
We have been gratified by so much interest in the question of education of minorities so it
was a very wise choice for the first forum and we have heard many useful suggestions.
Including, I must say, many additions suggested additions to the text.
It might be and I am sort of half serious here interesting intellectual discipline that if you
propose an extra paragraph, could you suggest ‘want to delete also’ I think you might find
that you would be trespassing the sensibilities of the many of the other participants this
particular meaning.
But anyway that is only half serious. Doubt we will take on board as many sensible
suggestions I think as we can deal with. And this brings out the old adage is that the
variety of minority situations and circumstances which we have seen today makes great
difficulty in the development of subsuming these concerns into a common language of
normative activity.
As I said in the opening remarks there are different sets of norms: there are the general
norms and there are the specific norms on minorities and indigenous peoples. They have
different histories. They have indeed in some ways in some ways different philosophical
background. And they do compound the problem allied that is to the variety of
circumstances of saying something useful and relevant in light of the local and national
experiences.
And we have has such a wealth of experiences presented today. So the draft certainly
needs revision and I think however without losing coherence I would cant simply be a
presentation of a kind of unstructured accumulation of ideas of great length; and
therefore joining the library of unread volumes and impractical documents. So we need to
avoid that. We need to look towards achievability and array of recommendations to be
realistically. They can operationalize in particular circumstances. This does not rule out
sharer language and more direct comment on obligations on the contrary. I think we
could in light of comments and other opening paragraph, make the basis and intention of
the draft clearer in terms of its relationship to international norms and the extent to
which it is focusing on the implementation of those norms.
As I said many interesting points. I have noted in general that we can certainly sharpen
the language. We can try to remove ambiguities. And I want particularly ambiguity which I
think was mentioned first as an ambiguity by the representative of the European of Lesser
Used Languages on the day-time special schools. Now we adopted that term we meant in
light of the, all I can say, the DH case to do with Roma, before the ECtHR. But one can see
the ambiguity in just using the bear terms “special schools” and “special classes” that other
meaning might be carried and I think we have to be a little bit more specific on that.