MINELRES: RFE/RL: Ukrainian Parliament to mull ratification of Minority-Language Charter

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RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report
Vol. 4, No. 46, 3 December 2002

A Survey of Developments in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine by the Regional
Specialists of RFE/RL's Newsline Team
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UKRAINE

PARLIAMENT TO MULL RATIFICATION OF MINORITY-LANGUAGE CHARTER 

On 29 October, President Leonid Kuchma again submitted the 1992 European
Charter for Regional or Minority Languages for ratification by the
Ukrainian parliament. The manner in which the charter would be
applicable would be important to Ukraine's largest minority, Russians,
as well as to smaller ethnic groups, such as Romanians, Hungarians,
Poles, Tatars, and Jews.

President Kuchma has backed ratification of 42 paragraphs of the
charter, although only 35 are needed for it to be adopted. The 42
paragraphs contain provisions for protecting and promoting the
linguistic and cultural rights of minorities in courts, as well as in
cultural, educational, and state institutions.

Ukraine joined the Council of Europe in 1995 and promised to ratify the
charter within 12 months. It was finally ratified by the parliament in
December 1999, but the Constitutional Court declared its provisions
unconstitutional. One constitutional clash concerned the question of
which languages could be used by state officials.

One expert in attendance at a Council of Europe seminar held in Kyiv on
18-19 October tried to dissuade the fears of Ukrainian speakers that the
charter would primarily promote Russian. According to that expert,
Council of Europe officials claimed at the seminar "that the language
charter is called to protect all languages. The bigger the ethnic group,
the greater protection liabilities the state should assume to protect
its language."

Nevertheless, opposition to the charter is again likely to come from
national democrats who now possess the largest faction in the Verkhovna
Rada: Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine. Especially as the new
presidential push to ratify the charter follows a move allegedly
instigated by the head of the presidential administration, Viktor
Medvedchuk, during the Council of Europe seminar to make Russian a state
language. In addition, protests will inevitably be submitted to the
Constitutional Court.

Although the Council of Europe seminar claimed that the Ukrainian
language would also benefit from the charter, this is unlikely. The
newly submitted charter for ratification by Kuchma only refers to
non-Ukrainian ethnic groups, although Ukrainians are designated
constitutionally as the "titular nation." Ukrainophones often feel that
they have a minority status in eastern Ukraine and Crimea where their
linguistic rights are ignored. The Council of Europe and the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe do not apply
national-minority and linguistic rights to the titular nation, assuming
that it is the duty of the state to promote its own dominant ethnic
group. This, of course, is true theoretically, but in the case of
Ukraine and, to an even greater extent, Belarus, this is not always the
case.

The charter also promotes the use of minority languages by state
officials, whereas the Constitutional Court ruled in December 1999 that
all state officials should use only Ukrainian. Official documents
produced in Kyiv, including during elections by the Central Election
Commission, are only in Ukrainian regardless of whether they are sent to
Lviv or Crimea.

Ukraine is not alone in debating the role of the charter as the entire
subject of national-minority and linguistic rights is highly charged
both in the West and in the East. The Council of Europe and the OSCE
have de facto adopted the widely shared assumption that Western, "civic"
states are consolidated, mature democracies and do not require active
intervention in minority and ethnic problems.

The opposite is held to be true of the East, which is assumed to be less
democratically advanced and more prone to ethnic discrimination and
conflict. The EU has only demanded that postcommunist states that desire
EU membership uphold good minority policies, a demand not made to
Western European states that were invited to join earlier. The OSCE has
only intervened in ethnic conflicts in postcommunist states, despite the
fact there exist more and longer-running conflicts in the West. The
United Kingdom, Spain, and Turkey have refused to sanction intervention
by the OSCE because they have defined their ethnic conflicts as
"terrorism."

Three other problems have rested on the question of how to define
"national minorities" and whether migrants and linguistic groups also
have rights. No common definition of "national minorities" exists in
Europe among states or the OSCE, and each state has been left to its own
devices either to define them or to deny their existence. The
legislation of some states, such as the United States, France, Germany,
the United Kingdom, Spain, Turkey, and Greece, denies that national
minorities exist and prefers to support only civic rights provided to
individuals, rather than collective rights to ethnic groups.

Most states deny that migrants, especially economic ones, should be able
to claim state assistance to protect their cultures. Russia has defended
the rights of Russian-speaking "compatriots" in the former Soviet Union,
not Russians, although linguistic groups are not traditionally afforded
protection as a group.

Ukraine is therefore not alone in having reservations about the Charter
for Regional or Minority Languages. As of July 2001, only 15 states had
ratified the charter. France refused to ratify it because it
contradicted its constitution, which provides rights to individuals,
regardless of ethnicity, language, or religion. Belgium, Greece,
Ireland, Portugal, and Turkey had not even signed the charter while
other Western European states ratified it with heavy revisions.

Most states have opposed any concept of collective rights, such as
separate ethnic universities (which Albanians have demanded in
Macedonia) and have allocated quotas in parliaments. They have also
demanded that all citizens should learn the official (state) language.
Some have opposed granting provisions to nonterritorial languages, such
as Roma, and some states have insisted that they have a right to define
to which languages the charter applies.

Most states have adopted a compromise policy of integration, in contrast
to the provision of collective rights through multiculturalism (as in
Canada) or full-blown assimilation, which was the most commonly held
policy prior to the 1960s.

The dividing line between "integration" and moderate "assimilation" is,
however, hazy. Moderate assimilation "is opposed not to difference but
to segregation, ghettoization, and marginalization," the well-known U.S.
scholar Rogers Brubaker concludes in the July 2001 issue of "Ethnic and
Racial Studies." Integration of minorities into mainstream society,
while providing for their rights, has always been the policy implemented
by Ukraine.
 
(This report was written by Taras Kuzio, a resident fellow at the Centre
for Russian and East European Studies and adjunct staff in the
Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.)

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Copyright (c) 2002. RFE/RL, Inc. All rights reserved.

"RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report" is prepared by Jan
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