In September 2025, members of the Institute of the Rights of Peoples (IRP), UNPO’s Secretary General, academics, and human rights practitioners gathered at the University of Tartu, Estonia, to discuss one of the most significant, yet least recognised, contributions to debates on peoples’ rights: the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (UDRP). The Declaration was the intellectual and political brainchild of the Estonian historian and orientalist Dr Linnart Mäll, a founding figure within both the IRP and UNPO. Mäll led the drafting of the Declaration through a series of conferences organised in Estonia by UNPO’s Tartu Coordination Office (TCO), a predecessor organisation of the IRP, between August 1998 and April 1999. Following extensive deliberations involving representatives of unrepresented peoples from five continents, the Declaration was formally adopted at UNPO’s Sixth General Assembly in Tallinn in 2001. Thereafter, the UDRP was the subject of two further conferences organised by the IRP and held in Estonia in 2004 and 2010, which explored its implementation and significance.

The 2025 workshop discussed here pursued two aims. First, it sought to recover and document the history of the UDRP’s drafting, with particular attention to the foundational role played by Mäll in that process. In doing so it also sought to renew connections with individuals in Estonia who had been part of Mäll’s wider intellectual and political circle during the 1990s, as well as those who contributed to the founding of the IRP in the early 2000s. Second, the workshop aimed to explore how the Declaration might be operationalised today to advance the rights and self-determination of unrepresented peoples. To support these discussions, it brought together individuals directly involved in drafting the UDRP alongside those currently researching and advocating on issues relating to peoples’ rights.In order to encourage open and candid dialogue, the workshop was conducted under the Chatham House Rule; accordingly, participants are not identified by name in this article.

Instead, the account presented here summarises the workshop discussions under three broad themes: context, content, and implementation. In doing so, it aims to encourage further reflection on how the Declaration – and the broader vision of peoples’ rights advanced by Mäll and the IRP – might continue to inform contemporary struggles for self-determination.

1- Context

The workshop opened with a series of reflections from individuals who had worked directly with Mäll and UNPO’s TCO during the drafting of the Declaration, alongside contributions from researchers examining the history of the UNPO and the IRP and their role within the broader landscape of peoples’ rights advocacy.
These discussions recovered the political and intellectual context in which the Declaration emerged. Contributors emphasised how the founding of UNPO, the establishment of its TCO, the subsequent creation of the IRP, and the drafting of the UDRP were all inextricably shaped by the optimism of the early post-Cold War period. This moment was described by those involved in UNPO’s early years as a time of new beginnings, when the collapse of the USSR appeared to demonstrate that freedom and independence were achievable for subordinated peoples. More broadly, participants reflected on how the end of the Cold War created space for rethinking both the meaning of self-determination and the structure of international order itself.
The initiative for the Declaration originated from representatives of the Republic of Tatarstan, based on an original draft authored by Professor Rais Tuzmukhamedov, a leading Soviet scholar of international law, in 1992. In 1998 and 1999, UNPO’s TCO organised three roundtable conferences to discuss and develop the draft. Following extensive debate among UNPO members – involving more than seventy participants through direct participation or written submissions – the Declaration was adopted two years later, in 2001, at UNPO’s Sixth General Assembly in Tallinn. When the IRP was established in 2003, the Declaration became one of its founding documents.
Workshop discussions underscored the significance of Estonia to the Declaration’s drafting process and the centrality of Mäll’s personal vision and networks to its emergence. On the one hand, Estonia’s own successful self-determination movement provided an important political and symbolic context for the UDRP during the 1990s, serving as a living proof of concept for the Declaration’s aspirations. On the other hand, as UNPO’s first Chairman and Director of the TCO, Mäll drew on deep connections with independence leaders from across the former Soviet Union, as well as with the Estonian government, to mobilise support for the project. Participants reflected on how Mäll’s rare ability to bridge academic, political, and civil society worlds had been essential to the Declaration’s development, while also acknowledging how difficult it is today to find individuals capable of playing a similar role.
Nevertheless, while the 1990s were widely recalled as a period of optimism in which small nations and peoples could imagine new political possibilities, discussions also highlighted a number of tensions that shaped the drafting of the Declaration, particularly the need to navigate competing discourses of self-determination. The language of decolonisation and national liberation associated with postcolonial movements remained influential during this period. At the same time, these collective understandings of political rights increasingly coexisted with an individualised human rights framework that partly displaced the collective ambitions of decolonisation. This transformation also coincided with the emergence of neoliberal globalism, within which the self-determining subject was increasingly conceived as an individual market actor.
It was within these competing currents that Mäll, first working through the TCO and UNPO and later through the IRP, sought to advance a vision of peoples’ rights that adopted the language of human rights while deliberately reasserting the collective and anti-colonial dimensions that mainstream frameworks had increasingly sidelined. The UDRP was the clearest expression of this vision. It thus represented a conscious act of intellectual and political resistance: an attempt to return peoples to the centre of international law.

2- Content

After discussing the context in which the UDRP was drafted, the workshop turned to consider its substantive content. In particular, discussions centred on the relationship between the UDRP and other international human rights instruments. Contributors reflected on how the decision to draft the Declaration was motivated by a recognition among UNPO members of the perceived shortcomings of the existing state-centric international system. In particular, members were frustrated by the fact that, despite the promise of the UN Charter – which opens with the words ‘We the Peoples’ – peoples themselves are rarely recognised as subjects of international law. Instead, that status remains reserved primarily for states and, to a more limited extent, individuals.
This critique of the disjuncture between the UN’s ideals and its institutional practices is expressed in the UDRP’s preamble, which situates the Declaration’s aims within the framework of existing international human rights law while asserting that states had failed to ‘respect’ and ‘implement’ the International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) during the latter half of the twentieth century. The UDRP therefore constituted a direct response to the IBHR, mirroring much of its structure and language while centring peoples as the primary subjects of international law and world order.
Of particular interest to many participants was Article 1 of the UDRP, which asserts that ‘All peoples have the equal right to self-determination’. Discussions noted that this formulation closely mirrors Article 1 of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), each of which begins with the statement that ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination’. However, the UDRP’s insertion of the word ‘equal’ gives the provision a distinct normative emphasis, explicitly underscoring the universality and non-hierarchical character of the right to self-determination. This distinction was seen as rhetorically powerful, particularly for smaller nations and peoples, insofar as it makes explicit that no people’s claim to self-determination is inherently superior to another’s.
Nevertheless, discussions also raised questions regarding the adjudication of competing and overlapping claims to self-determination. The exercise of self-determination, several participants argued, must therefore always be understood as a relational rather than a zero-sum process, requiring negotiation, reciprocity, and coexistence between different political communities.
Finally, the workshop turned to the concept of ‘peoples’ as articulated in the Declaration. It was observed that the UDRP does not provide a fixed definition of the term. While some participants suggested that this ambiguity may create challenges for advocacy and legal application, others identified it as one of the Declaration’s greatest strengths. The openness of the concept was seen to allow the UDRP to accommodate UNPO’s diverse membership, whose circumstances varied significantly, including groups identifying as Indigenous peoples, minorities, stateless nations, and other unrepresented communities.
Several participants also drew attention to Article 15 of the Declaration, which affirms a peoples’ ‘right to self-identification’. This provision was understood as reinforcing the Declaration’s broader commitment to allowing peoples to articulate their own political identities and aspirations, rather than having such identities imposed externally by states or international institutions.
Participants suggested that this openness around the definition of peoples may be especially valuable in the contemporary moment, as it creates space for solidarity and alliance-building between groups with differing historical experiences, legal statuses, and political objectives. Rather than prescribing a singular model of peoplehood, the Declaration was seen as offering a flexible framework through which diverse communities might pursue shared struggles for recognition and self-determination.

3- Implementation

One of the workshop’s most significant findings was the extent to which the UDRP had been lost from institutional memory after Mäll’s death, only recently being rediscovered through archival research in his personal papers. Recovering the history of the Declaration has become a central motivation for the current collaboration between the IRP and its partners, of which the 2025 workshop formed an important first step. In this sense, the event sought not only to reconstruct the history of the Declaration’s drafting, but also to reconnect that history with active reflection regarding the UDRP’s contemporary relevance.
The workshop therefore concluded by considering how the Declaration might now be operationalised within the contemporary geopolitical climate, and how its framework of peoples’ rights and self-determination could inform advocacy today. Underlying these discussions was a broader question concerning how the UDRP should be understood: as an aspirational legal instrument, a political document, or some combination of the two. Participants noted that this tension was already present during the Declaration’s drafting process. On the one hand, the UDRP adopts the language and structure of a formal legal document, cites existing legal instruments, and asserts in Article 19 that it should be ‘interpreted in the context of the international law of human rights’. On the other hand, the Declaration identifies perceived shortcomings within existing legal frameworks through its critique of instruments such as the IBHR, while also articulating broader political aspirations that challenge core tenets of the contemporary international legal order.
Nevertheless, much like the Declaration’s openness around the concept of ‘peoples’, participants suggested that this ambiguity may itself be productive in the present moment, allowing unrepresented communities to mobilise the Declaration across a range of legal, political, and advocacy contexts. Rather than viewing the UDRP solely as a legal instrument, several participants described it as an aspirational framework capable of articulating alternative political futures centred on the agency, equality, and self-determination of peoples. In this sense, the Declaration was understood by some as a ‘manifesto for peoples’ rights’ which, by articulating an alternative vision for the future constitution of the international order, might help guide advocacy across a range of issues and struggles.Participants also suggested that operationalising the Declaration today may require forging alliances with other groups pursuing related struggles and connecting the UDRP to contemporary global concerns, including climate change. In this respect, several participants noted that the Declaration was in some ways ahead of its time. The preamble establishes a connection between cultural diversity and biological diversity, framing self-determination not only as a political principle but also as an ecological necessity at a time when such concerns were not yet widely discussed within international forums.