ABSTRACT
The human rights response to ethnic1 issues has fluctuated considerably since the founding of the United Nations and the emergence of the regional intergovernmental organisations. There are reasonably coherent phases in legal dealings with the ethnic question. Each stage of development is at once the product and the progenitor of other life forms. The phases are not hermetically sealed off from one another, but have led into each other in complex ways which this essay explores. The essay also links developments in minority rights with indigenous questions even though the trajectories of the two are not entirely congruent. Attempts are made to differentiate developments, analyses and projections for the two constituencies where appropriate.
