This paper shows the possibility to blindly separate instantaneous mixtures of sources by means of a criterion exploiting order statistics. Properties of higher order statistics and second-order methods are first underlined. Then a brief description of the order statistics shows that they gather all these properties and a new criterion is proposed. Next an iterative algorithm able to simultaneously extract all the sources is developed. The last part is comparison of this algorithm with well-known methods (JADE and SOBI). The most striking result is the possibility to exploit together independence and correlation through the use of order statistics. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.