The principal claim made by this Article is that the realization of full and effective equality for all citizens and residents within a multi-ethnic state requires “participatory equality.” Creating a system of participatory equality entails, for most states, making drastic and fundamental changes to the state's legal system, public spaces, social and economic structures, and funding and space provided for ethnic, cultural, and religious institutions; however, this type of transformation is the only means of respecting human dignity and ensuring peace. This claim is first made as a normative moral claim based on principles of justice and dignity; as this Paper will show, a broad and effective interpretation of international law concerning minority rights supports the same normative claim.

This Article first reviews existing international law and other legal frameworks regarding national minority rights, including discussions of the specific case of indigenous peoples'rights and the intersection between individual and collective rights. The bulk of the Paper proposes a universal model, building upon existing legal frameworks, for building participatory equality for all members of a society, which requires the full and equal sharing of its resources in three primary domains: the public, the internal, and the historical domain. The need for such a model is all the more so for indigenous and minority groups of substantial size living under systems that cater to a majority based on ethnicity, religion, race or other dominant traits. Only when a nation's legal system secures the rights of all citizens to share equally in all of these domains can that nation fulfill the purpose of international minority rights legal bodies and deliver substantive equality to majority and minority concerns, both in law and practice.

Particularly in developing nations, the movement has been toward the articulation of elaborate provisions in constitutions which guarantee the basic human and peoples' rights of the citizenry. In many cases these are reflections of the immediate past history of the young nations which were strewn with ugly spectacles of dictatorships on their path to democracy. The history of Ghana is unfortunately an illustrative example. The Ghana Independence Constitution of 1957—a very brief document—was brief to a fault and bereft of any provision for human rights. It is clear that the experience of years of abuse of human, political, and civil rights in Ghana explains many of the current constitutional guarantees of basic rights spelt out in the 1992 Constitution in order to protect citizens against future abuses.

In the past, treaty obligations under municipal laws of Ghana were such that even ratification of human rights treaties did not directly confer enforceable legal rights in the domestic courts of Ghana and implementing legislation was necessary to make a treaty right justiciable. In the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, as well as others, are entrenched as constitutional provisions, are to be interpreted as such, and enforceable under the laws of Ghana. To the extent that drafters of the Ghana Constitution relied on the principles of the international human rights law enshrined in treaties and declarations, there are many similarities between the domestic law and some principles of international human rights law.