European minority protection regime
In international relations theory regime theories refer to the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations in a given area are built. In Europe since the 1990s the standards and documents on minority protection adopted in various international organisations have formed a normative system that can be regarded as the European minority protection regime. The institutions and documents of the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the European Union often refer to each other in the field of minority rights using quite similar concepts. The essence of this is that minority rights are part of the human rights system, typically as individual rights, with the aim of preserving minority identity, and that states have relative flexibility in the application of these rights. In some cases European regional organisations develop their positions in close institutional cooperation.