Immigration and Language Diversity: New Challenges for Human Rights

Eduardo J. Ruiz Vieytez, Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of the Pedro Arrupe Institute of Human Rights, Deusto University, Basque Country

« The new diversity compels us to rethink the classic legal models of accommodation of minorities and to reed human rights from a multicultural perspective. »

The movements of population are causing a severe readjustment of the identity scenarios in the developed societies of Europe and North America. The Western states, with their foundations laid on a culturally restrictive nation-state model, are increasingly ill-equipped to give institutional answers in front of a multicultural reality of their societies. Many of the migrant population will definitely settle in the societies they join and their belonging to the political community must be acknowledged from a standpoint of citizenship and inclusion, not only economic, but also cultural and in terms of identity. In order to do that, it is paramount to deconstruct classic concepts of our constitutional laws and to renegotiate the participation of all communities in the public space.

This reality, in turn, exacerbates or re-opens the debate on the traditional diversities of the western countries that had remained more or less relegated in the building process of the modern state. The acceleration of movements of people proceeding from different cultural realities brings up the convenience and necessity to rethink the forms of participation in the public space and the modes of legal protection of each one of the different diversities. At the same time, the new diversity generates in traditional but strong minorities new strategic as well as specific dilemmas. The conjunction of new and old diversities can be perceived by the later as a threat or as an opportunity.