Minority Rights Group International

Minority Rights Group

Founded	1969
Type	Non-governmental organisation
Focus	Minority rights Indigenous rights
Location	London, United Kingdom
Area served	Worldwide
Website	minorityrights.org

Minority Rights Group (MRG) is an international human rights organisation, headquartered in London, with offices in Budapest and Kampala. The organisation's mission statement is to secure rights for ethnic, national, religious, linguistic minorities, and indigenous peoples around the world. MRG has an international Governing Council that meets twice a year. MRG has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and observer status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The organisation was set up in 1969 by a group of activists and academics in order "to protect the rights of minorities to co-exist with majorities, by objective study and consistent international public exposure of violations of fundamental rights as defined by the UN Charter". ^[1] The organization is considered the main international advocacy organization in the field of minority rights, ^[2] and has produced a directory of minorities that are persecuted or denied political representation. ^[3]

Its first director was David Astor, editor and proprietor of The Observer newspaper at the time.

See also

• Genocide
• Global Human Rights Defence
• Minority group
• Minority rights
• List of human rights organisations

References

1. Founding statement of aims, Minority Rights Group
2. Kymlicka, W. (2007-12-20). "The internationalization of minority rights". International Journal of Constitutional Law. 6 (1): 32. doi:10.1093/icon/mom032. ISSN   1474-2640. For example, longstanding calls to turn the 1992 UN Declaration on minority rights into a bind ing convention have essentially disappeared from the debate. Even Minority Rights Group, the main international advocacy group in the fi eld, has stopped pushing this idea.
3. Alfredsson, Gudmundur (2015-01-01), Caruso, Ugo; Hofmann, Rainer (eds.), "Minority Rights and the United Nations", The United Nations Declaration on Minorities, Brill | Nijhoff, p. 35, doi:10.1163/9789004251564_003, ISBN   978-90-04-25156-4 , retrieved 2026-01-20

• Barzilai, Gad. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). ISBN   978-0-472-03079-8

External links

• Minority Rights Group International - Official website