Petra Roter is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Ljubljana, where she researches and teaches human rights, with a focus on minority issues.
She is the first woman to be re-elected as President of the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. As a member of the Advisory Committee, she has helped States design policies and legislation to ensure effective equality of everyone, regardless of ethnic/linguistic/religious affiliations, and societal integration whilst protecting minority rights. She has contributed to the Committee’s recent thematic commentaries, including the revised commentary on education.
She was a member of the Ad-Hoc Working Group to prepare a text for the Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the importance of plurilingual and intercultural education for democratic culture. She contributed to the implementation of several EU-CoE projects, including the drafting of a roadmap on inclusive education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the functioning of learning centres in Kosovo*.
She has also promoted Council of Europe standards on minority rights within other international institutions. In particular, she contributed to a number of thematic recommendations by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities as a conflict prevention institution, and was co-chairing the biggest annual UN gathering on minority issues: the 16th United Nations Forum on Minority Issues in 2023.
*This designation is without prejudice to positions on status and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ opinion on Kosovo Declaration of Independence.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
