October 2003 characteristics and to develop their culture, language, religion, traditions and customs, except where specific practices are in violation of national law and contrary to international standards”. Article 17(a) of the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child requires States Parties to “encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material” in accordance with the Convention’s educational goals, including the development of respect for the child’s own cultural identity and language as prescribed in Article 29. The Framework Convention echoes these provisions. In its Preamble, the Framework Convention states that a pluralist and genuinely democratic society should not only respect the linguistic identity of each person belonging to a national minority, but should “also create appropriate conditions enabling them to express, preserve and develop this identity.” Article 5(1) of the same instrument explicitly places an obligation on States Parties to promote the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities “to preserve the essential elements of their identity,” including their language. OSCE participating States are committed to protect, inter alia, the linguistic identities of persons belonging to national minorities according to the 1989 Concluding Document of the Vienna Follow-up Meeting 1986-1989 of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (Vienna Document, Principles, para. 19), the Copenhagen Document (paras. 32 and 33), and the 1991 Report of the CSCE Meeting of Experts on National Minorities in Geneva (Geneva Document, Chapters I, III, IV and VII). 4) The prohibition of discrimination on the basis of, inter alia, language is a bedrock principle of international human rights law. International instruments that prohibit discrimination expressly on the basis of language include: the UDHR (Article 2); the ICCPR (Articles 2(1) and 26); the ICESCR (Article 2(2)); the U.N. Declaration on Minorities (Article 2(1)); the ECHR (Article 14 and Article 1 of Protocol 12); and the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Article 21). Among OSCE documents, analogous commitments appear in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act (Principle VII) and the Vienna Document (Principles, para. 13.7), while the Copenhagen Document prohibits “any discrimination” (para. 5.9). The principle of non-discrimination includes a duty to treat differently persons whose situations are different, so that effective equality can be achieved. Paragraph 19 (under Principles) of the Vienna Document, for example, commits OSCE participating States to ensure the “full equality” of persons belonging to national minorities. If difference in treatment is to be nondiscriminatory, it must be based on reasonable and objective criteria, have a 16