MERCATOR :: News

June 2004

“BOLZANO/BOZEN DECLARATION” NOW PRESENTED TO THE EU-INSTITUTIONS AND STATES

June 2004 – The “Bolzano/Bozen Declaration on the Protection of Minorities in the Enlarged European Union” is being now presented to the EU-institutions and to all its member states for urgent consideration, as it contains several proposals, some concerning regional and minority languages. This text, symbolically signed on 1 May, has been drafted by a group of 16 independent experts in the field as an additional outcome of a conference held in Bolzano/Bozen/Bulsan, Italy, on 30-31 January, entitled “Minority Protection and the EU: The Way Forward”. The conference joined a range of experts, policymakers and NGO representatives to discuss the future of minority protection in the EU after the enlargement, taking into account that in the past decade the EU has set a more demanding standard to its new member states than to the old ones (see Mercator-Legislation News: April 2003) and that one of the questions raised now is whether minority protection will “vanish from the EU “scene”” or it will be transformed into concrete legal instruments. In this sense, the declaration puts forward several proposals to strengthen the existing minority protection policy in order to: improve monitoring of candidate states, integrate minority protection into EU monitoring of human rights within member states, strengthen the EU as a community of values, improve the cooperation among the EU, Council of Europe (CoE) and OSCE, and bring to life the new constitutional motto “united in diversity”. As regards the improvement of the EU-CoE-OSCE cooperation, the signatories recommend the European Commission to take into account the findings and developments in the framework of the two principal CoE instruments––the Language Charter and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. And in relation to the constitutional value of being “united in diversity”, the declaration states that the Commission “should propose a multi-year program for linguistic diversity with funds earmarked for regional and minority languages” and that the current EU’s language policy (e.g. the Lingua programme and the Action Plan on Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity) “seriously dilutes the minority component”.