2.7 Rights of Minorities, Marginalized Groups and Indigenous People

1. The minorities' protection (ICCPR Art 27): persons belonging to ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities — the enjoyment of their culture, profession of religion and use of language in community with others (the negative-protection core and the positive-measures debate).2. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP 2007): self- determination's internal face; lands, territories and resources; free, prior and informedconsent (FPIC); the cultural heritage; the declaration's soft-law force and its hardening paths.3. Nepal's catalogue (the exam's Nepali core): the Adivasi Janajati (the 59 listed indigenous nationalities), the Madhesi, the Tharu, the Dalits (the untouchability's constitutional bar and the Caste Discrimination Act 2068 — Criminology's cases' world), the Muslims, the persons with disabilities (the accessibility-and-reasonable-accommodation faces), the gender and sexual minorities (the Sunil Babu Pant case's line: the Supreme Court's 2007 decision recognising sexual minorities' constitutional protection — the third- gender recognition and the same-sex-marriage-study directives), the senior citizens, and the backward regions' peoples. The constitutional machinery: Art 18(3)'s non-discrimination with the special-provision proviso; Art 42's social justice (the inclusion mandate — the verifiedtexts); the proportional-inclusion system of the elections (Art 84); the dedicated commissions (U5.2.3 — the Dalit, Inclusion, Tharu, Madhesi, Muslim commissions' world); the marginalisation's honest audit (the implementation gap against the constitutional promises).