At the fourteenth Global Minority Rights Summer School in Budapest, UNPO brought the perspective of unrepresented peoples into a minority rights forum, challenging the longstanding legal separation between self-determination and minority protection.
The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) served as co-organiser of the fourteenth Global Minority Rights Summer School, held at the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest. Convened under the theme “Self-Determination and Minority Rights,” the programme was jointly organised by the Tom Lantos Institute (TLI), the Ludovika University of Public Service, the Human Rights Consortium at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London), and UNPO. The week-long intensive brought together students, researchers, practitioners, civil society representatives, and policymakers from around the world.
UNPO’s role as co-organiser reflects a milestone in the organisation’s advocacy. Under international law, self-determination and minority rights have developed along separate tracks. This distinction has had real consequences: communities classified as minorities have often found the door to self-determination claims shut.
Yet the categories of “people” and “minority” are not mutually exclusive. While not all minorities constitute peoples, peoples can also be minorities within the states they inhabit. Many UNPO members hold claims to peoplehood and self-determination while simultaneously living as minorities subject to discrimination, cultural suppression, and political marginalisation. The 2026 Summer School confronted this overlap directly, creating a rare space in which self-determination was examined as a complementary dimension of the protection owed to marginalised communities.
UNPO Secretary General Mercè Monje Cano, UNPO Advisory Board member Professor Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford) and Alex Manby (King´s College London) delivered a lecture on mobilisation strategies for self-determination, drawing on the organisation’s three decades of advocacy and recent interdisciplinary research.
The Summer School also featured lectures by the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Professor Nicolas Levrat; Hon. Dr. Litha Musyimi-Ogana, Chairperson of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Communities and Minorities in Africa of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights; Professor Mohammad Shahabuddin of the University of Birmingham School of Law; and other internationally recognised experts, activists, and policymakers.
UNPO extends its gratitude to the Tom Lantos Institute, particularly Director Anna-Mária Bíró and Professor Corinne Lennox of the Human Rights Consortium, for their continued commitment to advancing minority rights and for recognising the centrality of self-determination to that endeavour.
