A/74/160 up to World War II implicated minorities in at least two significant ways. Firstly, and perhaps more commonly appreciated, the atrocities committed against the Jewish minority, as well as against others such as the Roma, were very much in the minds of the framers of the two most significant United Nations human rights documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1948; and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which even preceded the Universal Declaration, since it was adopted by the Assembly one day earlier, on 9 December 1948. Secondly, however, there was a strong undercurrent of concern over the instrumentalization of the concept of “national minority”, as some felt had occurred when Nazi Germany used claimed mistreatments of German minorities in neighbouring countries as at least a partial pretext to justify its expansion. There were also undeniably often strong feelings after the 1940s, particularly though not exclusively in Western States, that the assimilati on of minorities was a desirable strategy. The view that ultimately prevailed at the United Nations was that there should not be any specific mechanism for dealing with minorities, in order to make a dramatic break from what are known as the so -called “minorities treaties” of the League of Nations. 25. These treaties are often misrepresented as enshrining collective rights that contributed to the inherently unstable interwar period, and hence were factors in preparing the conditions for the onset of war, if not a direct cause of it. Ironically, as other observers have noted, many of these minority treaties were not limited to protecting minorities, but rather were actually the first international human rights treaties, since they extended the prohibition of discrimination or freedom of expression and religion to all inhabitants of the States involved, not only to minorities. 3 Most of the provisions in these treaties were in fact individualistic, again contrary to the way they are usually portrayed. 26. As noted by a former Chief of the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “These arguments, echoes of which can still at times be heard in today’s minority rights discourse, largely prevailed in 1948, and the drafting proposal made by the United Nations Secretariat’s Division on Human Rights and others for minority rights provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were all eventually rejected”. 4 2. The many proposals for a definition 27. The definition of a minority by Francesco Capotorti is sometimes presented as the only one on hand at the United Nations (see E/CN.4/Sub.2/384/Rev.1) which explains why it is still referred to even though it was rejected by the Commission on Human Rights. To be perfectly accurate, Mr. Capotorti’s work was a more general study on the rights of minorities under article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The first dedicated attempt to define the concept of a minority for the purposes of that treaty after its entry into force was conducted at the request of the Commission on Human Rights almost 10 years after the Capotorti report by Canadian judge Jules Deschênes (see E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/31), but there were many other attempts before and after Mr. Deschênes’ attempt. __________________ 3 4 10/19 Fernand de Varennes and Elżbieta Kuzborska, “Minority language rights and standards: definitions and applications at the supranational level ” in The Palgrave Handbook on Minority Languages and Communities (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Antti Korkeakivi, “Beyond adhocism: advancing minority rights through the United Nations ” in The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities: A C ommentary, Rainer Hofmann and others, eds. (Brill Nijhoff, 2018). 19-11967