The document discusses the protection of minority rights under international and African human rights law. It provides definitions of minorities from various UN studies and notes that the ICCPR protects the rights of persons belonging to minorities to enjoy their own culture, religion, and language. In Africa, minority issues emerged with colonialism, but the OAU and African Commission initially gave little attention to them due to principles of non-interference and sovereignty. The document outlines relevant provisions in the African Charter and notes recent efforts through the African Commission to address minority issues.

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Protection of Minority Rights under the African Human Rights System
1 International Protection of Minorities
International law has been grappling with the definition of minorities or national minorities for quite a while without any apparent success. There is to date no internationally accepted and binding definition of minorities. This difficulty mainly arises from the variations among groups or people seeking protection as minorities among themselves as well as the sensitive nature of the issues they raise. Attempts have however been made by various actors to reach at such a definition. One among these is the one offered by Special Rapporteur Francesco Capotorti, while drafting a study in 1977 for the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. His definition reads:
“A group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non- dominant position, whose members-being nationals of the State-possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language” (Capotorti 1979)
Jules Deschenes has also given a similar definition of minorities as part of a study by the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities specifically focusing on the definition of minorities. (Hidayat and Zubair 2013, 54) Along with a third definition of ‘national minorities’ provided by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe1, these definitions are generally accepted in international law though not binding.
The most important binding document for the protection of minorities under international human rights law is the ICCPR, which under article 27, provides that:
“In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion or to use their own language.”
1 This provision is found under article 1of Recommendation 1201 on an additional protocol on the rights of national minorities to the European Convention of Human Rights (1993)

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This provision has been clarified through General Comment No. 23 of the Human Rights Committee (HRC).2 The general comment stated that the existence of a minority is not subject to the determination of a state and expansively interpreted the notion of minorities and the obligations of states towards these groups. Accordingly, the Committee found that a group need not be composed of citizens of the state to constitute a minority. The Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, which was adopted in 1992, took the issue further but remains a non-binding UNGA declaration.
2 Protection of Minority Rights in Africa
The emergence of minority issues on the African continent is attributed to the advent of colonialism and the partition of Africa among the major colonial powers. (Dersso 2010, 6) Colonial conquest brought the diverse African communities with different forms and levels of organization into arbitrarily drawn nation states. The logical result was the emergence of relationships of discrimination and domination among unequal groups living within the framework of the colonial state.3 The unitary postcolonial African state merely accentuated and entrenched these inequalities and perpetuated the subordination of some communities by the dominant groups and the state. (Dersso 2010, 9)
Despite the existence of minorities in Africa, the OAU and the African Commission gave little attention to minority issues. For the most part this related to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states (article 3/2 of the OAU Charter) and the principle of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states (article 3/3 of the OAU Charter). The Cairo Resolution on Border Disputes further entrenched this situation by declaring the inviolability of colonial borders. Similarly, the African Commission did not give attention to the issue of minorities until very recently despite the recognition of a range of collective and peoples’ rights in the ACHPR.
The ACHPR does not refer to the protection of minorities per se. However, there are various provisions of the Charter that are directly relevant to the protection of minorities. These are: non discrimination (article 2); right to equality before the law (article 3); right to take part in the cultural life of one’s community (article 17/2); People’s right to equality (article 19); and, the right to self-determination (article 20/1-3).
The OAU Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution established in 1993 could be considered an attempt to address the resulting gap in the context of conflicts arising from tensions between minority groups and African states. In 1994, the OAU Assembly of Heads
2 General Comment No. 23: The rights of minorities (Art 27): 08/04/1994 CCPR/C/21/Rev./Add. 5, General Comment No. 23
3 This set up is a result of a range of political, economic, demographic, geographic, social and cultural factors that gave some groups the upper hand. In many cases this process was facilitated by a conscious process of stratification dictated by the colonial state to ensure division among the various groups subservient to it.

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of State and Government also called for "the protection of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of all our people, including national minorities, and the creation of conditions conducive to the promotion of this identity" (Declaration on a Code of Conduct for Inter-African Relations).
In 1999, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (Commission) appointed three of its members to undertake research on the situation of minorities in Africa. However, the issue of minorities did not become a focal issue in the African human rights system until the establishment of the African Commission’s Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Communities/Populations in 2003. The Commission in 2005 adopted the report of the Working Group.
3 Bibliography
Capotorti, F. "Study on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities." New York: United Nations, 1979.
Dersso, Solomon A. "Introduction." In Perspectives on the Rights of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples in Africa, by Solomon Dersso (ed.), 3-22. Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press (PULP), 2010.
Hidayat, Rehman, and Muhammad Zubair. "Development of Minorities’ Rights and Critical Analysis of Contemporary Comparative International Human Rights Law for their Protection." International Research Jouranal of Social Sciences, Vol. 2(7), 2013: 55-58.