Abstract
This paper shows how farsighted the approach by Paolo Carrozza was in his work on minority rights. In particular, the holistic, societal approach toward minority issues has been adopted and further developed in a number of international soft-law documents that in recent times aim at keeping minority-rights instruments up-to-date. This is particularly the case of the Commentary on Linguistic Rights of Persons Belonging to National Minorities adopted by the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Most of the domestic legislation on minority rights are still reluctant to adopt such a perspective, but this seems the only way to achieve better integrated societies.