Fwd: TOL: Minorities in Romania Granted Language Rights

Reply-To: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 17:51:22 +0200 (EET)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: TOL: Minorities in Romania Granted Language Rights

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>

Original sender: Petra Kovacs <[email protected]>

Fwd: TOL: Minorities in Romania Granted Language Rights


from: Transitions Online [[email protected]]
 
Minorities in Romania Granted Language Rights
 
CLUJ, Romania - At the end of an extraordinary session, the Romanian
Parliament's lower house on 19 January adopted a controversial law on
public language use. The law was seen as a long-awaited victory for
the country's minority populations and came hot on the heels of last
week's property restitution measure


http://www.tol.cz/look/TOLnew/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=6&NrSection=6&NrArticle=549&ST1=body&ST_T1=letter&ST_PS1=9&ST_max=1
 
The so-called Local Public Administration Law not only decentralizes
public administration, but also gives minorities - mostly ethnic
Hungarians - the right to appeal to local authorities and bodies in
their own languages in areas where they represent at least 20 percent
of the population. Signs will be written in minority languages, and
local government decisions will be announced in minority languages as
well. Some 11,000 towns and villages are estimated to fall into this
category.
 
Rather than making any languages other than Romanian official, the law
simply allows for the adoption of provisions regarding respect for
minority languages contained in the European Charter of Local and
Regional Languages of the Council of Europe (CoE), which has been
signed but not yet ratified by Romania.
 
Adversaries of the minority language provision included the xenophobic
Greater Romania Party (PRM), which protested and boycotted the
adoption of the law, calling the provisions "anti-constitutional." PRM
leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor on 19 January called on like-minded
parliamentarians to halt the transformation of what he termed "the
language of horses" (Hungarian) into Romania's second official
language. The PRM secretary-general and extreme nationalist mayor of
Cluj, Gheorghe Funar, threatened to organize public protests against
the law.
 
Ethnic Hungarian politicians in both Hungary and Romania warmly
welcomed the legislation. In Romania, Bela Marko, chair of the Ethnic
Hungarian Party (RMDSZ), called the new legislation "the most
important development of the last decade in regard to minorities."
 
In Hungary, both the ruling party and the opposition praised the move.
Socialist parliamentarian, minorities expert, and CoE Parliamentary
Assembly member Csaba Tabajdi told Nepszabadsag that by adopting the
bill, Bucharest has fulfilled its obligation to the CoE's language
provisions.
 
The law's odyssey is not yet complete, however. As the Senate approved
a slightly different version of the law, a mediation commission will
decide on the final text to be approved by a joint parliamentary
session.
 
-by Zsolt Istvan Mato in Cluj, with reporting from Laszlo Szocs in
Budapest
Copyright � 2001 Transitions Online. All rights reserved.
 
----------------
Addresses for the Multiethnic Group:
Post message: [email protected]
Unsubscribe:  [email protected]
Moderator: [email protected]
List web site: http://www.egroups.com/group/multiethnic
Multiethnic Project: http://www.osi.hu/lgi/ethnic
LGI: http://www.osi.hu/lgi

-- 
==============================================================
MINELRES - a forum for discussion on minorities in Central&Eastern
Europe

Submissions: [email protected]  
Subscription/inquiries: [email protected] 
List archive: http://www.riga.lv/minelres/archive.htm
==============================================================