A/77/246 genocide prohibition from the Convention on the promise that they would su pport a similar measure for the Universal Declaration. However, when the time came, they chose (for reasons having to do with the rhetoric and reality of the Cold War) not to make good on those promissory notes”. 6 28. The zeitgeist at the time of the creation of the United Nations was nevertheless that the world emerging from the ashes of the last global conflict had to represent a fresh new start, and, for the first time, to have at its core a set of fundamental universal and individual-oriented human rights. It is no accident that the preamble of the Declaration and its first substantive provisions frequently refer to all individuals as holders of rights and to their universal application. 29. While this sounds noble, there was an underlying concern, at least for some (mainly) Western States, that distinct rights for, or acknowledgment of, groups was inconsistent with the individual and universal nature of this new paradigm. For many of them, particularly colonial powers or newer States with large immigr ant or indigenous populations, ethnic, religious or linguistic differences were not to be encouraged. On the contrary, the assimilation of minorities was for most of the twentieth century often considered to be a highly desirable outcome. 30. There was also the perception that the rights of minorities had been exploited during the rise of Nazism, and that the instrumentalization of the concept of “national minority” over claimed mistreatments of German minorities in neighbouring countries was at least in part a pretext to justify the expansion of Germany, leading to World War II. Ultimately, the view that prevailed at the United Nations was that there should be no specific mention of minorities in the Declaration, so as to make a dramatic break from what are known as the “minorities treaties” of the League of Nations. This however was a mischaracterization of the League of Nations minorities treaties: 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 [among other things] they extended the prohibition of discrimination or freedom of expression and religion to all inhabitants of the States involved, not only to minorities. Most of the pro visions in these treaties were in fact individualistic, again contrary to the way they are usually portrayed (see A/74/160, para. 25). 31. Arguably, during the League of Nations period between the two world w ars, there was the recognition of equality, which included specific protection of particularly vulnerable groups, as the advisory opinion of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the case of the minority schools in Albania in 1935 suggests: The underlying idea of the treaties for the protection of minorities is to secure for certain elements incorporated in a State, the population of which differs from them in race, language and religion, the possibility of living peacefully alongside that population and cooperating amicably with it, while at the same time preserving the characteristics which distinguish them from the majority, and satisfying the ensuing special needs. In order to attain this object, two things were regarded as particularly necessary, and have formed the subject of provisions in these treaties. __________________ 6 22-11516 Johannes Morsink, “Cultural Genocide, the Universal Declaration, and Minority Rights”, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 21, No. 4 (November 1999), p. 1010. 9/21