The Venice Commission believes that some provisions of the law on minorities should be revised
The Venice Commission has published an opinion on Ukraine's law on national minorities, which recommends that some of its provisions be revised.
The Venice Commission recommends
- extend the right to organise events in minority languages to all persons;
- remove the obligation to translate information about public events into Ukrainian at the request of visitors;
- review the obligations related to the publication of books in Ukrainian and bookstores in view of the principle of proportionality;
- to postpone the translation of the education system into Ukrainian.
The commission also decided to provide recommendations on the laws on the state language, education and media, which are not related to the topic of national minorities.
"By artificially contrasting the protection of the state language with the rights of minorities, the Venice Commission recommends the cancellation of important provisions that protect the Ukrainian language," said Ukrainian MP Volodymyr Viatrovych.
We are talking about the requirements of the Law on Media that 90% of programmes on national and 80% on regional channels must be in Ukrainian, as well as the Law on Language that 50% of the range of books in bookstores must be in Ukrainian. In the law on media, the commission demanded that language quotas be removed and that the media be allowed to broadcast in all languages, including Russian.
The commission noted that translations of advertisements, place names and other names must be in minority languages. However, there is no provision for signs in Ukrainian, which is discrimination against Ukrainians.
"Advice to allow signs without a Ukrainian-language version has nothing to do with protecting minorities and is a call to discriminate against Ukrainians in their own country," Viatrovych explained.
The Law on National Minorities (Communities) came into force in Ukraine in March 2023. It is among the seven recommendations of the European Commission that Ukraine must implement in order to continue its progress towards the EU.
Ukraine did not request such an opinion before adopting the law in December 2022, although it did use previous opinions.
