A/CONF.189/PC.1/7
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United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
61.
Education and culture can also be an area of aggravated discrimination. UNESCO
Conventions and other extra-conventional instruments contain many interesting provisions.
With regard to education, first of all, the Convention against discrimination in education of
14 December 1960 prohibits discrimination as defined in article 1, based in particular on race,
religion or national origin. Articles 1 and 5 of the Convention speak not only of “person” but
also “groups of persons” and “national and religious minorities”.75
62.
Concerning cultural property, recent conflicts have shown that deliberate attacks against
symbolic sites are aimed at destroying the most representative characteristics of an ethnic
group’s cultural and religious identity. Among the many instruments adopted by UNESCO,
mention should be made of the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event
of Armed Conflict, adopted at The Hague on 14 May 1954, which considers the cultural property
in question to include movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural
heritage of every people, such as monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or
secular, etc.76
63.
Finally, the overlap between race and religion is inseparable from the culture of a people
or minority. UNESCO and several specialists [Capotorti, 1991]77 acknowledge that culture is
basically a matter of tradition, in the broad sense, i.e. everything that is socially inherited or
transmitted through language, pictures or simply by example: beliefs, including religious beliefs,
knowledge, customs, symbols. This means that culture covers, to a considerable extent, the
ethnicity of a group or minority and that discrimination is likely to be aggravated if it is aimed at
one of its components.78
64.
Certain instruments, while they establish the overlap between race and religion, are
aimed at protecting particularly vulnerable categories of persons. One such instrument is the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted on 20 November 1989; it contains a considerable
number of relevant provisions that could form the basis for the elimination of aggravated
discrimination.79 The provision relating to minorities, to take one example, extends protection
against discrimination, including religious discrimination, to indigenous peoples.80 In the
context of minorities, the term “indigenous people or population” is applied to a people or
population that meets three essential criteria, namely, prior establishment in a given territory,
non-dominance and a claim to an identity that might incorporate features of a religious nature
[Schulte-Tenckhoff, 1997].81 Several indigenous peoples are also defined by their religious
beliefs and practices, and it is difficult to imagine talking about these cases without talking about
the overlap between race and religion (see below, chap. II, sect. A).
C. Regional protection
65.
Racial and religious conflicts or tension exist to one degree or another on every continent.
However, a study of the systems established reveals that the development of such conflicts or
tension is certainly not in proportion to the actual or potential intensity of separate or aggravated
forms of discrimination. The extent to which minorities, as the ideal target for aggravated