Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

56 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:27
history, COE at its 1993 Vienna meeting declared antisemitism to be a great
evil, and was joined by CSCE and other institutions working in tandem to
issue and adopt several human rights standard-setting texts, among them
NATO’s 1994 “Partnership for Peace,” the EU’s 1995 “Stability in
Europe,” and COE’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities, significantly enhancing its bedrock Convention on
Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950. 44
This 1995 COE Framework Convention offers a much more robust
program for enhancement of minority rights and status than did the 1992
UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to
National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (although this declaration
was the first international human rights instrument dedicated solely
to minority rights since before World War II). The convention spelled out
for Europe that “the protection of national minorities and of the right of
persons belonging to those minorities forms an integral part of the international
protection of human rights and as such falls within the scope of international
co-operation [and is not an internal affair subject exclusively to the
sovereign state concerned].” Following the example of the European Parliament
in 1993, the convention also condemned Holocaust denial in “emphasizing
the insidious nature of revisionist theories, some of which go so far
as to claim that the Holocaust did not take place,” and urges member states
to adopt legislation condemning “any denial of the genocide perpetrated
during World War II and any justification and attempt at rehabilitation of
the regimes and institutions which were responsible parties to it.” An
important step by CSCE was its creation in 1992 of the post of high commissioner
on national minorities to provide “early warning” and “early
action,” and the next year adding to the commissioner’s mandate the
requirement to address “all aspects of aggressive nationalism, racism, chauvinism,
xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.” 45 In 2000, COE member states
held a special conference in preparation for the 2001 UN Durban Conference.
It drew up a “Political Declaration” that expresses alarm at manifestations
of “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and
related intolerance,” presses all states to “reject ethnic cleansing, religious
persecution, and genocide,” and exhorts members “never to forget the Holocaust”
and to make Holocaust denial a punishable offense, insisting that
the issues of violence against Jewish communities and dissemination of
antisemitic propaganda must be dealt with forcefully. COE’s human rights
44. Jennifer Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-
States System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 50.
45. Natan Lerner, Group Rights and Discrimination in International Law, 24-
25.