Abstract /
Ongoing crises like the return of war to Europe, economic hardships, and the illiberal challenge raise worries about minority-majority relations anew, while one can hardly expect the adoption of strong pro-minority reforms in the short run. Innovative solutions are needed that strengthen minority rights while remain politically realistic. European institutions have been experimenting with forms of collective redress, a remedy whose logic are relevant in the minority rights context. I argue that more reliance on collective redress should ensure better enforcement and can work independently from major pro-minority reforms.
Aggregation of claims through collective enforcement can empower minorities, shaping the landscape of representation and agency, costs, evidence, and organization. Building on insights from early cases of minority reparation, e.g. Holocaust cases, and seeking to develop solutions that are applicable for a range of minorities, the research will focus on a limited set of cases: Roma and Hungarian minorities in Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania will be studied, also allowing to assess how collective redress mechanisms can play out amid rule of law challenges. The ultimate goal is to develop proposals on how European institutions could adopt regulation on collective redress mechanisms to promote more effective minority rights enforcement that bring tangible benefits in local settings.
Bio /
Zsolt Körtvélyesi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow ("MINOTEE: Minority Rights – Towards Effective European Enforcement") at Central European University. He is affiliated with the Centre for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), and the Department of Human Rights and Politics of the ELTE Social Science Faculty, Budapest. He holds a law degree (U. of Szeged, 2006) with specialization in French Law (U. of Paris Nanterre, 2005) and European Studies (U. of Szeged, 2005), a Nationalism Studies MA (Central European U., 2009), an LL.M. (Harvard Law School, 2014, on Fulbright Scholarship), and an S.J.D. (Central European U., 2016). He has research experience in questions of nationalism and comparative constitutional law, regarding issues of citizenship and minority protection in particular, and human rights in the EU in the pre- and post-accession context. His publications include "The Illiberal Challenge in the EU: Exploring the Parallel with Illiberal Minorities and the Example of Hungary" (European Constitutional Law Review, 2020/4), "Transcending the Individual/Collective Minority Rights Divide: A Procedural Solution" (International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 2022), "EU Enlargement Policy and Human Rights" (The European Union and Human Rights, OUP, 2020, with Beáta Huszka).
The research 'MINOTEE: Minority Rights – Towards Effective European Enforcement' is a Maria Skłodowska-Curie project funded by the European Union under grant number 101110729 — MINOTEE — HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01.