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"More than any recent occasion, the First International Conference on the Right to Self-determination & the United Nations, held in Geneva during the millennial year 2000, dramatized the range of claims and the severity of suffering associated with their denial under a variety of statist and geopolitical pretexts... a truly historical contribution..." From the Preface by Richard Falk

Clarity Press, Inc. is pleased to announce the publication of In Pursuit of the Right to Self-determination: Collected Papers & Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Right to Self-determination & the United Nations. This title records an historic milestone in the struggle of the international community to come to grips with the thorny issue of the internationally-recognized right to self-determination. UN experts, Members of various parliaments, distinguished scholars and representatives of national minorities deeply concerned with the right to self-determination examined the international and domestic institutional options for pursing cultural and socio-economic equal status between internal ethnic groups, with a view to just demands, preventive management and conflict resolution.

The Collected Papers address such questions as:

• The Role of the UN in implementing just demands for self-determination
• Self-determination as a form of collective restorative justice
• The relationship between policies of forced assimilation and racism, ethnocide and armed conflict
• Self-determination through minority rights, internal autonomy or Secession
• Self-determination as a means of further democratization of the UN and the international system

Contributors include: Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University; Mme Erica-Irene Daes, Special Rapporteur of the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, and former Chairperson of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations; Françoise Jane Hampson, an expert with the UN Sub-Commission; George Reid, Deputy Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament; The Right Honourable Gerald Kaufman is a member of the British Parliament and former member of the Privy Council; Mr. Joseph v. Komlossy, Vice President of the Federal Union of European Nationalities; Mme. Ragnhild Nystad, Vice-President of the Sami Parliament, Norway; Karen Parker, Chief/Delegate of the International Educational Developmental/Humanitarian Law Project at the United Nations, is an attorney specializing in human rights and humanitarian (armed conflict) law; Daniel Turp, Canadian Member of Parliament and Bloc Quebeçois Critic for Intergovernmental Affairs from 1999-2000 and Bloc Quebeçois spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, 1997-1999; Kenneth Deer, publisher/editor of the newspaper The Eastern Door, and a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake; Suzette Bronkhurst of the Magenta Foundation, Netherlands; Marquetta L. Goodwine, Chieftess of the Gullah-Geechee Nation; Mehdi Imberesh, Professor in the Social Sciences Faculty of Al-Fateh University, Tripoli and Ameen (Ambassador) of the Jamahiriyan People's Bureau to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1981 to 1986, and since then to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Y. N. Kly, Chair of IHRAAM and professor of international law at the School of Human Justice of the University of Regina, Canada; Dr. Hans Koechler, Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Innsbruck, and Director of the International Progress Organization, Vienna. and member of the Council of Europe's Expert Group on Democratic Citizenship.

Interventions from NGO attendees from all corners of the globe concerning the self-determination needs of a wide range of indigenous populations, minorities, and nations are included: the Kashmiris, Native Americans, African Americans, Irish, Tamils, Samis, South Moluccans, Dalits of India, Canadian First Nations, Khmer Krom of Vietnam, Chechens, Mon of Burma, Puerto Ricans, the Quichua indigenous nation of Ecuador, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), the Zanzibaris of Tanzania, the American Gullah-Geechees, etc.