A/77/246 E. Minorities at the United Nations: fluctuating interest and developments 45. While the human rights of minorities in 1947 and 1948 were very much the subject of intense negotiations and debate at the United Nations, even warranting the adoption of a specific resolution at the same time as the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the issues described above hint at a generalized reluctance to refer directly to minorities in any further instrument, with the exception of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. 46. During the period from the end of World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union, a multitude of factors combined to put the further development of the human rights of minorities on the back burner globally, as compared with most other groups, including factors such as disagreements over whether minorities should be subjects of rights, the extent of such rights and who could claim them (see A/74/160, paras. 24–26); States having explicitly assimilationist views towards some minorities and therefore being unwilling to commit attention or further efforts; the concerns in the decolonization period over the often artificial borders inherited from former colonial powers and ensuing fears of fragmentation along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines in Africa and Asia; the Cold War struggle for influence between competing b locs; and even the United Nations’ own statist nature as an international organization made up of and mainly representing the interests of States. 47. This, however, changed significantly and favourably during the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, with concerns at the United Nations and some reg ional organizations following the end of the Cold War over rising majoritarian nationalism and an upsurge of conflicts involving minorities, as well as concerns over further fragmentation and destabilization in Europe and Central Asia, though not limited t o that part of the world. 48. At the end of the Cold War, 35 of the 37 major armed conflicts, from Northern Ireland to Myanmar, were internal and could be attributed in one form or another to ethnic, religious or linguistic factors, usually reflecting clashes between minority and majority groups within territorial boundaries over real or perceived grievances. It was impossible for the international community to ignore the upsurge in conflicts, humanitarian crises and even genocides involving minorities occurring in places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and other parts of the world around the time of the end of the Cold War. 49. The upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Europe and elsewhere t hus provided a fertile context for acknowledging and addressing minority rights and their protection. It was arguably the horrors of violent conflicts and war that brought the need for protection of minorities sharply into focus. This is the context that l ed to the adoption of a plethora of instruments and measures in Europe, such as the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the 1994 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, adopted by the Council of Europe in 1992 an d 1994 respectively, and the adoption of accession criteria for the admission of a country to the European Union, which included “stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities”. The importance and prominence given by the 1992 Summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki, to the rights of minorities and mechanisms to respond to their grievances, and therefore prevent conflicts, was striking. The Helsinki Summit culminated, among other things, in the creation of the mandate of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities as an early warning and early action conflict prevention mechanism “in regard to tensions involving 22-11516 13/21