Minorities and effective political participation: a survey of law and national practices 2010, para. 48
Paragraph- Paragraph text
- Human rights treaty bodies and courts have dealt with a range of cases involving the right to effective participation of minorities and the related prohibition of discrimination. As regards requiring proficiency in an official language, the Human Rights Committee has held that a Government's failure to introduce legislation to permit the use of other languages disproportionately affected certain minority communities, since it denied them the use of their mother tongue in administration, justice, education, public life and Government, thus constituting a violation of article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee concluded that the State was under an obligation to provide the community with an effective remedy, namely by allowing its officials to respond in languages other than the official one in a non-discriminatory manner. In another case, barring a member of a minority from standing in local elections on the grounds that her proficiency in the official language was not adequate, when such an assessment was conducted in a deficient and arbitrary way and when in fact the person already held a language certificate, was deemed by the Committee to be a violation of articles 2 and 25 of the Covenant. On the same issue of barring a member of a minority from standing in elections because of allegedly inadequate proficiency in the official language, the European Court of Human Rights has found that this can constitute a violation of article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention. In the particular case, the Court held that it had grave doubts as to the legal basis for subjecting candidates holding language certificates to further tests. The Court also considered that the testing lacked objectivity and procedural fairness.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on minority issues
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Education
- Equality & Inclusion
- Social & Cultural Rights
- Person(s) affected
- Ethnic minorities
- Year
- 2010
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Paragraph number
- 48
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