FUEN President Loránt Vincze: European minority protection needs to be improved

“The international legal instruments currently in force do not offer sufficient guarantees for the protection of national and linguistic minorities. Furthermore, the Member States of the European Union have different norms and apply different standards in minority protection. This obvious inequality shows that the situation should not be considered an exclusively internal affair of the Member States, and that the EU ought to opt for an European level legislative framework for the protection of autochthonous national minorities”, stated FUEN President Vincze Loránt at a conference in Budapest held this week. The conference on the subject of language rights and minority protection was jointly organised by the Foreign Affairs of Hungary and the Council of Europe.

Minority protection should be a shared competence of member states and the EU, focusing on two main elements, stated FUEN President Loránt Vincze. One of these principles is that given rights cannot be taken away by the states, such as the example of the education law in Ukraine. It basically took away the rights of people belonging to a minority community in Ukraine to be taught in their mother tongue. The other principle would be the sharing of best practices in the field of minority protection among the member states. Loránt Vincze argued that matters would greatly improve should the Council of Europe consider upgrading the existing legislative instruments with more efficient monitoring mechanisms and sanctions in case of violations. The president of the European minority organisation pointed out that in an ideal case the CoE level regulations could be transferred into the EU framework.