Legal Instruments

The international community has adopted a range of agreements which promote and protect languages. As part of this movement, UNESCO plays an essential role in advocating, supporting and monitoring policies and actions in favour of cultural diversity and multilingualism on the international level, and has developed a number of standard setting instruments to that end: 

• Convention against Discrimination in Education, 1960
  
  
• Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 2001
  
  
• Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage , 2003
  
  
• Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Access to Cyberspace, 2003 
  
  
• Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2005

UNESCO also endorses the principles underlying UN instruments addressing language issues, such as:

• the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,  1966
  
  
• the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities,  1992
  
  
• and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007
  

Worth mentioning is the resolution on the Implementation of a language policy for the world based on Multilingualism adopted at the 30th session of the UNESCO General Conference in 1999; it strengthened the Organisation’s position on multilingualism and revealed Member States’ will to translate into concrete action principles stated in these normative instruments.