A/77/246 The General Assembly, Considering that the United Nations cannot remain indifferent to the fate of minorities, Considering that it is difficult to adopt a uniform solution of this complex and delicate question, which has special aspects in each State in which it arises, Considering the universal character of the Declaration of Human Rights, Decides not to deal in a specific provision with the question of minorities in the text of this Declaration; Refers to the Economic and Social Council the texts submitted […] and requests the Council to ask the Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities to make a thorough study of the problem of minorities, in order that the United Nations may be able to take effective measures for the protection of racial, national, religious or linguistic minorities. 25. The present thematic report considers the extent to which the United Nations has since 1948 been able to take effective measures for the protection of racial , national, religious or linguistic minorities. C. The initial hesitancy to recognize the human rights of minorities 26. There has been a long-standing hesitancy to acknowledge specifically the rights of minorities, despite their historical vulnerability to abuses and atrocities. This could be seen even before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the emergence of the international crime of genocide with the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which refers to genocide only occurring when committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, rather than a national, ethnical, racial or religious minority. 5 Almost all modern era genocides have involved minorities as victims: Hereros in current-day Namibia, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews and Roma during the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, Tutsi in Rwanda and Rohingya in Myanmar. While Muslim Bosniaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina were a plurality at the time of the genocidal acts of 1995 in Srebrenica, they did not constitute an actual majority according to the 1991 census, accounting then for 44 per cent of the population. 27. While the atrocities committed during the Holocaust ag ainst the Jewish and Roma minorities were clearly in the minds of the drafters of the Convention, this first post-war treaty did not seek to grant any human right to individuals or collectivity. Instead it criminalized a very narrowly defined crime targeti ng a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” of victims. This was not, however, a foregone conclusion: there was significant overlap in the discussions during the drafting of the Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with a numb er of States, including Arab and Communist countries favourably inclined to more directly referring to minorities, both in the Declaration and as part of the debates around the inclusion of the concept of cultural genocide in the Convention. Western States, and particularly States from the Americas, aggressively opposed any such addition, owing at least in part to their avowedly assimilationist policies in this era. As Johannes Morsink has noted, some Western European Governments argued that “the right plac e to make a connection between cultural genocide and physical genocide was in the Declaration and not in the Genocide Convention itself. Therefore, they voted to delete the cultural __________________ 5 8/21 Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by the General Assembly in its resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948. 22-11516