Re: Legal conflict on language in Estonia

Date: Wed, 28 Jan 98 08:43:29 -0500
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Legal conflict on language in Estonia

From:   MINELRES moderator       <[email protected]>

Original sender: Fernand De Varennes <[email protected]>

Re: Legal conflict on language in Estonia


The issue of whether a democratically elected individual can be removed from
office because of failure to meet certain language requirements established
by the government is a subject with which I have dealt briefly in a working
paper I prepared for the United Nations Working Group on the Rights of
Minorities and wrote about for others.

In legal terms, the lawyer(s) who has prepared the legal arguments for the
elected officials being brought before the administrative court because they
have limited knowledge of Estonian have missed the strongest legal arguments
in my view: that the language requirements are in the circumstances contrary
to Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 
[and Article 2 read in conjunction with Article 25). When s/he states that
the Estonian requirement is in violation of Article 25 of the Covenant, s/he
must not raise Article 25 in isolation: it must be argued in conjunction
with Article 2, that the requirement is unreasonable in the particular
circumstances of the case, that it creates a distinction based on language
which is therefore discriminatory.

May I also point out that the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the
Conference on the Human Dimension is not a legal document.

I can send a copy of the relevant parts of my work, but if you do not raise
the issue of the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of language as
prohibited in the UN system (and which is more comprehensive than the
limited European protection), you will be repeating arguments that have
already been unsuccesful in other cases.

Dr Fernand de Varennes 
European Academy 
Via Weggenstein 12 a I-39100 
Bolzano ITALY
Tel: +39-471-30-61-29 
Fax: +39-471-30-61-99
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