Niamh Nic Shuibhne

Minority Language Rights

Contests over human rights as claims or entitlements to state assistance are how a major, if relatively recent, feature of the socio-political processes and institutions, of modern societies (Turner 1993). Within this wider debate about human rights, the subject of minority rights has long been of concern (Dinstein and Tabory 1992, Sigler 1983). A widely held, but not unanimous, view has emerged which argues that minorities have group or collective rights which cannot be reduced to their human rights as individuals. Linguistic and cultural rights are seen by many scholars as two such overlapping dimensions of collective minority rights (de Varennes 1996, Kymlicka 1995a, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). In a world of multicultural and multilingual states, so the argument runs, these collective rights can only be guaranteed by the active involvement of states in the implementation of policies which support linguistic and cultural rights, just as in the case of more universally recognized and accepted social and economic rights (Stavenhagen 1990).

Derogating from the Free Movement of Persons: When Can EU citizens be Deported?

Ten years ago, the Bayerisches Landessozialgericht referred four questions to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling; the resulting judgment on Maria Martinez Sala’s entitlement to a child-raising allowance finally yanked the concept of Union citizenship from its sluggish hinterland in the EC Treaty and launched the Court and the Community legislature on a mission—to uncover the substantive content and scope of citizenship, and to realise its potential as an autonomous rights-giving force. The intervening decade has seen enthusiastic, if not always coherent, progression of this vocation, and thereby renewed animation of Community law on the free movement of persons. Much work in this field seeks to plot the evolving rights for EU citizens; but what about the position of the Member States? Their capacity to determine and manage their own immigration rules had already been eroded by ‘traditional’ Community law on workers, establishment and services.