INTERNATIONAL LAW ASPECTS OF CULTURAL AUTONOMY

The article seeks to analyze in what ways international law can facilitate or limit ethnicity-based non-territorial autonomy (NTA). NTA serves as a category of practice lacking a uniform understanding. NTA has gained two basic interpretations: as a collective entitlement to promote ethnicity, language and culture and as the idea of granting certain public functions and resources to self-governing organisations. Some 'soft law' provisions explicitly employ the notion of non-territorial autonomy or self-administration; they are declaratory and far from being instrumentalised. However, there are more specific and instrumental provisions as well as case-law which fit into the second understanding of NTA; but these approaches are more restrictive than of the first cluster. This gap can be explained in terms of differences between symbolic and instrumental policies, taking into account the ideological function of international law, or the function of generating non-controversial macro-narratives.