UN Convention on Genocide

Establishing Human Rights Standards

As long as the governments can define human rights according to their own perspectives and cultural norms, achieving global human rights remains a challenge. That said, the adoption of UN conventions is an important step. It is important to recognize, however, that simply ratifying a convention does not always change a specific nation’s practices. While UN conventions may be ratified, they may in turn conflict with a nation’s established laws. The process of ratification, then, often represents simply a first step in a broader series of changes, and this applies to legislation on linguistic genocide.

UN Convention on Genocide

As per the genocide definitions in the UN Convention on Deaf Genocide, both adults and children all over the world suffer cultural and linguistic genocide almost every day. There are six definitions of genocide described in the UN International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948). Among these, today’s minority and indigenous education is reflected in two of them. Article II(b) addresses “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and Article II(e) addresses “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Notably, many minority children, including deaf children, receive subtractive teaching. Said another way, they get their education through a dominant language. This inhibits them from gaining the requisite skills and knowledge of profound literacy that would be necessary for their democratic participation and socioeconomic mobility and also fails to make the most of their innate capacities. Nearly 98% of the world’s population of deaf children have never received their education in the language with which they are most comfortable (the signed language of their nation). Such effort in forcibly trying to make the deaf [Page 984]children oral is at the expense of signed languages worldwide. Thus, deaf children are routinely deprived of fully expressing themselves in their own languages. Notably, since deaf children who do not have Deaf parents often fully depend on a formal education to acquire sign language, they are arguably even more deprived than other linguistic minorities when education in their language is denied.

Interpretations of Linguistic Human Rights

The major bearers of cultural and linguistic diversity throughout the world are the minorities and the indigenous people. Some of the main direct agents of cultural and linguistic genocide today include the mass media and the educational system. Linguistic rights are seen as part of human rights and are now often referred as linguistic human rights (LHRs). Linguistic and cultural diversity are found as important as the biodiversity; the relative higher level of one, positively affects the other. Signed languages are part of linguistic diversity around the world.

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