Response Paper 21,01,2014 By: Miguel Angel Maldonado Salazar

Covering ethnic, religious, racial, and cultural minorities, International Law and the Rights of Minorities is a book which is certain to endure as the treatment of the subject. Thornberry has performed the subject of minority rights the service of serious, comprehensive and balanced treatment in spite of the difficulties of the theme.

Minorities rights are difficult to accommodate within the individualist and universalist framework of human rights, and the book show us the the analyze of different themes showing us how the international law is required to deal with dilemmas such as individual versus collective rights, passivity on the part of the state towards minority cultures or positive action to promote them, and nation-building as against group selfdetermination and autonomy.

we can see more clearly some grroup-specific rights by discussing the minority protection rules. in this lecture is more than interesting the different approaches that the author make in order to analyze more properly the connotation of any of this rights.

some concepts introduced in the curse regarding the protection of national, ethnic and linguistic minorities in modern societies are clearly applied in their connection to legal concepts like non discrimination. but also leaves open the debate about how effective are this concepts to protect this rights? in positions of some regards and limitations of the states and even minorities in reference to this international instruments.

it is important to se in this book the assessment of the achievements of international law in these areas and the explores the possibilities for future.