ABSTRACT
The Council of Europe, as the regional organisation promoting democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, has adopted the most comprehensive set of standards protecting minority rights in Europe through the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM). This chapter delineates two core institutional periods used to analyse how the Advisory Committee on the FCNM (ACFC) has integrated the concepts of gender awareness, multiple discrimination, and intersectionality into the minority rights regime. It highlights the synergies between the political level, through the recommendations of the Committee of Ministers and the Council of Europe as an institution, and the “technical” level, through the gradual construction of the ACFC's soft jurisprudence on intersectionality, which simultaneously reflects and feeds into institutional policies. Through an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the ACFC's working methods and the use of the later concepts, this chapter discusses for whom and how the ACFC has developed its jurisprudence on women belonging to national minorities. It demonstrates that the ACFC's work on women belonging to national minorities, including Indigenous Peoples and Roma and Travellers, offers solid principles and standards exemplifying the implementation of the theory of intersectionality into the soft jurisprudence of a human rights monitoring mechanism, contributing to making the FCNM a “living instrument” of international law.
