[Bears Armed]

Now at vote _

Quote: Linguistic Rights Declaration
A resolution to improve worldwide human and civil rights.

Category: Human Rights
Strength: Mild
Proposed by:  Zeppy


Description: This World Assembly,

RECOGNIZING the situation of each language, in view of the considerations that include political and legal, ideological and historical, demographic and territorial, economic and social, cultural, and linguistic factors,

CONCERNED that language communities are currently threatened by:
a) a lack of official recognition by their national communities and the international communities,
b) a limited population, that may be partially or wholly dispersed,
c) an unmodified language,
d) or a dominant culture opposed to their own culture, which makes it difficult for languages to survive, flourish and develop;

REALIZING that in order to ensure peaceful coexistence between language communities, overall principles must be found so as to guarantee the promotion and respect of all languages and their social use in public and in private;

HEREBY:

1. DEFINES language communities as any sapient society established historically in a territorial space, whether it be recognized or not, which identifies itself as a people and has developed a language as a means of communication and cultural cohesion among its members and is considered to be of a minimum of twenty-five percent of the total legal population of the nation state or any political subdivision that contains said historical territorial space within its' jurisdiction;

2. DEFINES languages as a system in which a culture or organized group of people use symbols and/or sounds for the encoding and decoding information, that include written languages, sign language, tactile languages and oral languages;

AIMS to encourage the creation of a political and socioeconomically framework for linguistic diversity based upon respect, coexistence and mutual benefit,

HEREBY:

1. MANDATES all nations to recognize the right of an individual to be a member of a language community, the right to the use of one's own language both in private and in public, except where such public use would be prohibitively expensive to the nation, the right to interrelate and associate with other members of their language community of origin, the right to maintain and develop their own culture; to respect the right of access to cultural services, and to encourage a presence of their language and culture in the communications media;

2. MANDATES that all individual governments and organizations must formally create a system in which language communities may petition the aforementioned organizations to recognize their languages;

3. MANDATES that language communities that are within the jurisdiction of the nation states they are located shall be free of government infringement upon the right of languages communities to teach their own language and culture;

ESTABLISHES the Council on Linguistic Rights to collect data limited to statistics of minority language communities, in order to aid nations in taking all the appropriate steps to implement the rights proclaimed in this Declaration within their respective areas of jurisdiction and to foster the exercise of linguistic rights in communities which are demonstrably lacking in attention.[/quote]


What do you think?
I think that the basic idea is certainly worthwhile, but the actual text is too badly flawed...


:Bear:

[Jagera]

Jagera cannot support this resolution. The 25% threshold is flawed - smaller but important groups may exist, and this does nothing to really recognize what a language, as compared to a dialect, may be.

The resolution does not define what it means to be historically established, either. Taking a fictional country called "Canada", for example, we could imagine there is a group speaking a language called "French" who have lived in a given area for 400 years. Are they historically established, as compared to those in a fictional region called "Europe" who have been in a given area for 1000 years, or those in another region of Canada speaking a language called "Chinese" who have been there for 100 years? (OOC: No, the Chinese in Canada don't make up 25% of the population [yet], but it serves to illustrate).

The resolution also very carefully to define "languages" and "language communities", and then starts throwing around terms with debatable definitions, such as "cultural services". Not to mention it does not mitigate cultural services, nor allow nations to restrict harmful cultural education (such as if a culture had a traditional genocidal outlook towards another group).

Probably not the clearest statement on my part, but nevertheless, no.