Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law. The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analysing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

The absence of a regional system of human rights protection for Asia, and the ambivalence of some Asian states towards existing human rights regimes often results in a lack of awareness of the plight of minorities in these states. The existing human rights literature on Asia tends to focus on the debate of cultural relativism. On the other hand, minority rights literature largely ignores Asia. This book tackles this lacuna by undertaking an analysis of the minority rights legal regimes in India, China, Malaysia and Singapore, while also locating this discussion in the context of a wider debate on human rights in Asia. India and China, the world's most populous states, face similar problems vis-a-vis minorities, yet tackle these using starkly different techniques. Malaysia and Singapore, vocal in their articulation of 'Asian Values', have taken opposing stances over minority rights. Malaysia has sought to establish Malay hegemony using minority rights tools in favour of the majority, while Singapore deliberately adopted a doctrine of meritocracy, nonetheless emphasising ethnic fault-lines within its population. Together the four states reflect not only the complex layers of culture and identity within Asian states, but also the vastly different political systems and contrasting conceptions of the role of law in the continent. Through its examination of minority rights theory and its application in specific cases, this book provides a useful comparative model for the assessment of other states within Asia, thereby taking an important first step towards understanding the situation of minorities within the entire continent.

Countries in the Pacific face unique challenges of survival and progress in establishing themselves and participating fully in international society. Their geographic isolation from the rest of global society is compounded by complex layers of often competing national and indigenous identities among their populations built through wave upon wave of migration. This has created rich diversity, competing regimes and real challenges in terms of state-building, ethnic identity, social policy cohesion and development in post-colonial settings. The issues studied here would be of interest to scholars from a range of different disciplines such as Law, Politics, Sociology and Anthropology. By examining the theory and practice of minority rights law in states such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea, alongside their more familiar neighbours Australia and New Zealand, this book makes a unique contribution in a region often ignored in the literature.

This important volume brings together a range of material in different areas of law and the social sciences that address questions concerning the rights of minorities. The discipline is arguably one of the oldest branches of public international law, and owes its heritage to those who struggled to create standards to protect the numerically inferior and non-dominant communities from the excesses of the majority. While reflecting this rich heritage, the works contained in this volume show the extent to which policy constructs (especially in law) have begun to pay heed to the need to include minorities in different domestic settings across the globe. To provide readers with a structured approach to understanding global minority rights law the editor divides the issues into six main headings, namely: Historical Development; Conceptual Development; Contemporary Challenges; Fundamental Norms of Minority Protection; Specific Rights of Minorities; Human Rights and Minority Rights.