Education on the protection of minorities

• Author: Luca Refrigeri
• Position: Associate Professor of Social Pedagogy, University of Molise, Department of Human, Historical and Social Sciences
• Pages: 73-79

EDUCATION ON THE PROTECTION OF MINORITIES

Luca Refrigeri

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Abstract

In the current social context not only the European minority protection through law is

considered to be the most effective way to ensure peaceful coexistence between different

ethnic groups and civil, more likely, only through education for tolerance and mutual respect

is it possible to integrate the different ethnic groups.

Key words: Minorities, Immigration, Education, Integration, Tolerance.

Introduction

Compared to the natural difficulties of man to live in a peaceful and civil area, the

instrument of legal protection of minorities, which appeared since ancient times and

established itself firmly in the seventeenth century, is today the form of protection which

international and Europe in the belief that the fundamental freedoms should be protected by

law. In the context of multi-ethnic, conversely, the legal protection of minorities, which seems

less and less to ensure peaceful coexistence in one nation-state, must run alongside the

general education intervention as a means to ensure coexistence.

1. The legal protection of minorities

The protection of groups of people united by characteristics of an ethnic, racial,

religious, linguistic, or any other nature, who live permanently in a local context where they

represent a minority compared to other, has an ancient origin, presumably the same with the

establishment of the earliest forms of social life. Faced with the need to conduct their lives

together in the same area shows the difficulty of their living together for mutual natural

tendency to defend their status and values, ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, social and

economic. Although this difficulty to the coexistence of man is ancient, natural, only recently

has found the will to adopt forms of protection t o minority groups, recognizing the need to

ensure that they have fundamental rights, civil rights and political namely the right to life,

personal identity, freedom of thought, religion, voting, privacy, etc.., and social, economic

and cultural rights, in particular the rights to food, housing, education, work, health care, etc.

This will is manifested through actions that have a relevance, however, mainly from the legal

point of view. Despite some cases of different legal treatment of minorities have been found

in antiquity and the early forms of legal protection relevant to the contemporary international

law are traced back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when it is initiated the

creation of many modern states, it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that the

international community has adopted positive norms concerning this matter

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. The first

references to the normative issue of legal protection of human rights, understood this without

any distinction of race, ethnicity, religion, language must be given to the "Universal

Declaration of Human Rights”.

The UN, a few years later, he set out for the first time at international level the principle

of promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all

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Associate Professor of Social Pedagogy, University of Molise, Department of Human, Histo rical and Social

Sciences, luca.refrigeri@unimol.it

1

P. Simone, 2002, p. 3).

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(ONU, 1954, p. 3).