Civil-rights movements often seek to ensure that individual rights are not denied on the basis of membership in a minority group.
[3] The issue of minority rights was first raised in 1814, at the Congress of Vienna, which discussed the fate of German Jews and especially of the Poles who were once again partitioned up.
The Congress expressed hope that Prussia, Russia, and Austria would grant tolerance and protection to their minorities, which ultimately they disregarded, engaging in organized discrimination.
In Britain, William Gladstone made the massacres of Bulgarians by the Ottoman Empire a major campaign issue and demanded international attention.
[7] By contrast there was little or no international outrage regarding the treatment of other minorities, such as black people in the southern United States before the 1950s when African colonies became independent.
[8] Before the World War I, only three European countries declared ethnic minority rights, and enacted minority-protecting laws: the first was Hungary (1849 and 1868), the second was Austria (1867), and the third was Belgium (1898).
All the new successor states were compelled to sign minority rights treaties as a precondition of diplomatic recognition.
After World War II, the legal principles were incorporated in the UN Charter and a host of international human rights treaties.
[11] While initially, the United Nations treated indigenous peoples as a sub-category of minorities, there is an expanding body of international law specifically devoted to them, in particular Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (adopted 14 September 2007).