MERCATOR :: News

October 2004

ROMANIA: LATEST EVENTS REGARDING MINORITY LANGUAGES AND EU ACCESSION (Divers Bulletin)

October 2004 – The European Commission has made public its 2004 Regular Report on Romania’s progress towards accession, dated 6 October (see also Mercator-Legislation’s News: November 2003). As a general conclusion, the Commission considers that Romania continues to fulfil the political criteria, among which “respect for and protection of minorities”. As regards, minority language issues, the report states the following: “Relations with other minorities [apart from the Roma] did not present major problems during the reporting period. The law providing for bilingual signs has been applied, including in localities where the minority population is less than 20% (the threshold indicated in the law). After the constitutional revision introducing the right for citizens to use their mother tongue in civil court cases, Hungarian is extensively used in certain areas (see Mercator-Legislation’s News: September 2003). The law on the statute of police officers allows the recruitment of officers speaking minority languages, but the number of police officers with this skill remains relatively low. As regards pre-university teaching in minority languages, there was a slight decrease in the number of educational units and in the number of students being educated in their mother tongue during the 2003-2004 school year. The decrease could be due to demographic trends as there was no change in education policy. A private Hungarian university continued to function in Cluj, with branches in Miercurea Ciuc, Oradea and Târgu Mure. A protocol to establish two Hungarian faculties within Cluj state university was agreed at governmental level, but it has not yet been implemented. Treatment of the Csango minority has further improved and Hungarian is taught as an optional subject in 10 communes.”

As regards the latest parliamentary activity in Romania concerning minority issues, the Government approved a bill on 22 October aiming at aiding ethnic Romanians living abroad, as well as their descendants, and preserving their cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious identity. The cultural and educational benefits they would receive would be extended also to members of national minorities who emigrated from Romania, such as Jews or ethnic Germans. The bill is yet to be debated and approved by the Parliament. Furthermore, two parliamentary groups within Romania’s Chamber of Deputies, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) and the group representing ethnic minorities, have stated that they will collaborate in the future legislature to draw up a law on national minorities (see Mercator-Legislation’s News: August 2004, September 2003, and February and July 2001).

Moreover, the representatives of ethnic minorities in the Parliament spoke out on October 11 against the Ministry of Education and Research’s policy regarding the publishing of schoolbooks, as they sustain that it is making children give up their education in their mother tongue. They claim that as regards minorities other than the Hungarian and German ones the Ministry has only re-published books from before 1989. For instance, in the past 15 years the state has only edited one new book in Slovakian. As a solution to fill the gap, the Serbian minority proposed to use schoolbooks from the mother country.