In recent years, the attention is being increasingly drawn to the role of the European Union on the development of minority rights in the candidate countries. The adoption of the Copenhagen political criteria, which also require "respect for and protection of minorities," as preconditions that applicants must have met before they could join the Union has inevitably led to some policy changes to the minorities in Eastern Europe. This policy shift is particularly directed at minority language rights, because one of the most important aspects of the protection of minorities is the recognition of their linguistic identity. The aim of this study is to explore to what extent this development has influenced the situation of language rights of the Kurds in Turkey. In order to answer this question, it first examines the relationship between the Copenhagen criteria and international and European standards protecting minority language rights. Secondly, considering those standards, it assesses the achievements and failures of the recent legislative amendments which are directed to bring the language rights of the Kurds within the line of the Copenhagen criteria. The case of Turkey reveals the vast potential of the European enlargement process on the development of minority language rights, but also its limits in situations where there is a lack of political will to respect and protect diversity.

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published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This study focuses on the struggle to integrate St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a small private school in Austin, Texas. A close examination of the history of this community sheds light on how privileged whites navigated questions of integration, especially in Christian communities. Pro-integration whites in these communities utilized their faith, understanding of community, and a rhetoric of respectability to move the school towards desegregation, forging a “middle way” through Civil Rights that achieved the goal of integration without damaging white interests in the community. Following St. Andrew’s through the 1970’s and 1980’s, this study moves beyond the implementation of official integration policies to trace how the school wrestled with questions of minority enrollment, white flight, and the relationship between private communities and the public sphere. Over the course of three decades, St. Andrew’s increased minority enrollment but adopted a narrower and more inward-focused understanding of community, becoming a more diverse space but not fundamentally questioning the nature of a private school in times of public crisis. / text

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / In the post-Cold War era, two major trends illustrate the evolution of the international security environment: the spread of democracies and the emergence of asymmetric threats. The former focuses on freedom, the latter on security. New democracies must pay close attention to fundamental values and norms that stand at their core, such as respect for human rights and civil liberties, rule of law, and civilian and democratic control. At the same time, they need effective and efficient intelligence to fight the new threats. Regulating intelligence activities is one of the greatest challenges of a democratic regime because there is a fundamental clash between the democratic culture, based on individual freedom, openness, transparency, accountability, and the secrecy and security-oriented intelligence culture. A fundamental question is raised: How to democratize intelligence and maintain its efficiency and effectiveness at the same time? The conundrum of intelligence reforms requires a trade-off between the need for good intelligence and the respect and promotion of democratic values. This thesis analyses the impact of democratization on intelligence in four major areas: mandate, structure, control, and professionalization. It studies the major academic debates on the matter and then applies the theoretical framework to the Romanian case. / Outstanding Thesis

This thesis set out to determine the interaction between gender and social movement participation. In other words, it is answering the questions: how are women able to interact social movements and how do social movements enable women to be full participants in their struggle? It uses an intersectional framework to examine two social movements: the Black Civil Rights Movements that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) that began in Chiapas, Mexico in the 1980s and works to this day. For the Civil Rights Movement, it finds that the major organizations did not enact any policies or make any structural changes to incorporate women more fully into the Movement. Furthermore, women that wanted leadership roles in the Movement often had to forge their own by means of grassroots organizing and local women-led political action groups. For the EZLN, it finds that the organization gave women both leadership positions and military titles, passed the Women's Revolutionary Law that codified women's rights within the organization and the community, and lastly created autonomous municipal governance structures to enforce women's rights.

The thesis surveys and analyses Commonwealth Bills of Rights. It examines the content of these Bills of Rights and considers their origin and political implications. The first chapter reviews the political history of Bills of Rights generally. This is followed by a chapter dealing with the initiation and introduction of Commonwealth Bills of Rights. Particular attention is given to the attitudes and influences of British officials and advisors. The third chapter considers the general forms of Commonwealth Bills of Rights and the ways in which such guarantees are qualified. The next three chapters examine the substance of the particular guarantees and note judicial cases that are of particular interest. In the seventh chapter some of the political implications of these Bills of Rights are considered. The eighth chapter concerns judicial attitudes toward the enforcement of a Bill of Rights. This is followed by concluding remarks.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Includes bibliographical references. / Ph.D.

On April 17, 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was proclaimed into force. By including a set of constitutionally entrenched core legal rights (i.e. ss. 8, 9, and 10(b), and a remedial mechanism designed to enforce those rights (i.e. s. 24(2)), the Charter had the potential to alter certain repressive elements of the criminal justice system that had endured in Canada for over a century. Despite this potential, both the core legal rights and s. 24(2) were drafted using vague terminology. As a result, the Charter ‘s ability to succeed where previous attempts at instituting effective due process protections for Canadians had failed would depend largely on the judiciary’s ability to satisfactorily craft such protections out of imprecise statutory language. This thesis will argue that the Supreme Court of Canada has created a test for the exclusion of unconstitutionally obtained evidence under s. 24(2) that fails to adequately protect the core legal rights of the socially, racially and economically marginalized individuals to whom the Canadian criminal justice system is disproportionately applied. In advancing this argument, the relevant jurisprudence and academic literature will be analyzed according to a methodology inspired by the Critical Legal Studies movement. The issue of exclusion will be examined in its social context, primarily by analyzing the current system of Canadian criminal justice and acknowledging its over-application to the socially disenfranchised. It will be argued that the Supreme Court’s test for exclusion has developed as it has because of the judiciary’s subconscious tendency to interpret unclear constitutional provisions in keeping with the dominant conservative ideology, a method that favours maintaining the social status quo. The purpose of this thesis is to set out a framework for a reform of the Charter ‘s exclusionary mechanism. This new approach will attempt to situate social context at the forefront of the s. 24(2) decision-making process. It will be argued that the concept of “disrepute” within s. 24(2) must be redefined so that it captures investigatory practices made possible by unjust social, racial and economic divisions that render certain groups powerless, and thus more vulnerable to police surveillance.