A Comparative Study between the Status of the Rights of Minorities in the Iranian Charter on Citizen's Rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Minorities

The topic of minorities rights is one of the blatant manifestations of human rights, which has been considered by the national and international legal systems. Protection of minorities rights is to be done in legislative form and through the legal documents and non-legislative form. A comparative analogy between the substance of the UN Declaration on Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992) and the Iranian Charter on Citizen's Rights (2016) as non-obligatory documents, may picture the panorama of the minorities rights in the two mentioned systems. The comparison reveals that the Charter coincided with the international standards mentioned in the declaration through considering particularly the non-discrimination principle, cultural participation and diversity mentioned in the declaration. It should be mentioned that the Charter has not considered some affirmative obligations of the government in protecting the survival of minorities and non-considering the prohibition and punishment of the minority rights activists. Still the Charter is much more developed than the declaration in some fields like considering the prohibition of hatred speech. The noticeable compatibility of the Charter substance with the declaration reveals that the Charter is implicitly impressed by the declaration.