{"id":29062,"date":"2022-04-29T09:59:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-29T06:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eliamep.lncdoo.com\/nomiki-kinitopoiisi-gia-dikaiomata-meionotiton-stin-kentriki-kai-notioanatoliki-evropi-ena-programma-drasis-beata-huszka-kai-alloi\/"},"modified":"2024-08-28T11:06:40","modified_gmt":"2024-08-28T08:06:40","slug":"nomiki-kinitopoiisi-gia-dikaiomata-meionotiton-stin-kentriki-kai-notioanatoliki-evropi-ena-programma-drasis-beata-huszka-kai-alloi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eliamep.gr\/en\/nomiki-kinitopoiisi-gia-dikaiomata-meionotiton-stin-kentriki-kai-notioanatoliki-evropi-ena-programma-drasis-beata-huszka-kai-alloi\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal Mobilisation for Minority Rights in Central and South-Eastern Europe: an agenda for action – Be\u00e1ta Huszka et al."},"content":{"rendered":"

On September 2\u20133, 2021, a workshop was held at ELIAMEP at which participants discussed their prospective contributions to a collective volume with the working title \u201cLegal Mobilisation for Minority Rights in Central and South-eastern Europe (CSEE)\u201d. The contributions tracked rights-claiming by three large groups of minorities in areas historically ruled by the multicultural Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Ottoman empire: Hungarian minorities living around their kin-state, Roma across CSEE, and Muslims in the Balkans, including Turks, Muslims, Albanians, and Bosniaks.<\/p>\n

The edited volume will be the first systemic study of minority-rights activism in its political and geographic context, with a focus on how ethnic minorities use law in practice. Rather than focusing on high-visibility international litigation, which is dominant in the extant scholarship, the volume tracks legal action from the national and local level up, assessing the impact of legal mobilization in terms of social change, not simply legal success.<\/p>\n

Read here<\/a> in pdf the Policy brief by Be\u00e1ta Huszka,\u00a0<\/strong>Lecturer, ELTE Social Science Faculty; former Marie Sk\u0142odowska-Curie Fellow, ELIAMEP;\u00a0Lilla Farkas, <\/strong>Lecturer at the Department of Human Rights and Politics, ELTE Social Science Faculty and Zsolt K\u00f6rtv\u00e9lyesi<\/strong>,\u00a0Researcher, Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences);Lecturer at the Department of Human Rights and Politics, ELTE Social Science Faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This project has received funding from the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842553, which was carried out at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy”<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
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Introduction\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Little attention has so far been paid to the impact of ethnic populism on the national minorities who have traditionally been excluded \u201cothers\u201d in Central and South-eastern Europe.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This contextual and bottom-up analysis is particularly timely in light of the democratic backsliding in the region and the rise of ethnic populism. The minority-rights regimes imposed by Western powers on CSEE following WWI and those introduced after the fall of the Soviet Union have never properly been able to overcome majoritarian suspicion of the dual allegiance of minority groups. Nationalist narratives were reignited by the refugee crisis, pushing minorities to share a platform with asylum seekers, putting their democratic membership in question again. Scholars studying populism have problematized how national populists create polarization between insiders and outsiders by targeting both \u201cinternal outsiders\u201d, which is to say migrants and refugees, and \u201cexternal outsiders\u201d, who can be persons but are also presented as institutions \u2013 the EU, globalization, radical Islam, or George Soros, for instance \u2013 that threaten the national way of life or security. However, in this context, little attention has so far been paid to the impact of ethnic populism on the national minorities who have traditionally been excluded \u201cothers\u201d in Central and South-eastern Europe; minorities that must now struggle against the tide of ethnic populism and illiberalism that serves national majorities, which is a particularly steep uphill battle compared to what now appears to have been the heyday of minority-rights protection that preceded the EU accession of the respective Central and Eastern European countries.<\/p>\n

Since their host states\u2019 EU accession, minority representatives are increasingly turning to domestic courts, which have become the option of last resort for rights-claiming as the opportunities for political mobilization by minority parties dwindle with the increasing inequality in the power relations between minorities and majorities.<\/p>\n

National minorities slipping off the EU\u2019s agenda<\/h2>\n

These dynamics have received surprisingly little attention from European decision-makers, who come to the rescue of ethno-national minorities only if their plight poses a security challenge \u2013 an approach that risks rewarding escalation. Thus, minority issues were prioritised by the EU in the aftermath of the Balkan conflicts, while the threat of westward migration propelled the rights of eastern Roma onto the EU agenda. In fact, the plight of national minorities in CSEE is as much a human rights issue as a security one. It is time for the EU to recognize that some of its Member States are systematically violating the rights of their citizens because their ethno-national identity is different to that of the ethnic majority.<\/p>\n

For security reasons, the EU paid greater attention to minority rights as a form of political conditionality during the Eastern enlargement process. Since then, however, it has failed to monitor how the now full members of the EU treat their minorities. Signs of the gradual deterioration of minority protection in the region abound. Despite the sustained political attention to Roma rights, the situation is stagnating at best in the new Member States as systemic discrimination continues. While the EU has issued a European Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies and relied on the Racial Equality Directive for the defence of Roma rights, several EU Member States have been pursuing openly discriminatory policies against the Roma. Although around 20 per cent of Roma live in slums on the verge of homelessness in EU Member States, the EU Commission has not to date initiated infringement procedures against the countries concerned. Despite the numerous legal victories against segregated education, forced eviction, discriminatory social housing regulations, etc., many rulings favourable to the Roma have yet to be implemented.<\/p>\n

As Krassimir Kanev, a contributor to the volume, writes, virulent hate speech inflicted by politicians from a position of power on Roma, migrants, LGBTQI, and Macedonians mostly goes unpunished in Bulgaria. This not only harms the human dignity of minority individuals and communities, it also encourages discriminatory behaviour. Before the European Court of Human Rights, the minority in Western Thrace, Greece \u2013 recognized as \u2018Muslim\u2019 \u2013 successfully challenged restrictions on minority associations relating to the inclusion of \u2018Turkish\u2019 in their name. The restrictions were imposed because the adjective \u2018Turkish\u2019 allegedly threatened public order by propagating the idea that an ethnic minority exists on Greek territory. As Dia Anagnostou, another contributor, explains, the rulings of the Strasbourg Court have not been implemented.<\/p>\n

The Hungarian minorities\u2019 right to use their language in public remains mostly unenforced in Romania and Serbia, although it is guaranteed in principle by generally generous legal frameworks. In both countries, the Hungarian language can mostly be used in minority institutions, such as minority schools and churches, while local public authorities fail as a rule to provide for the use of Hungarian in official local domains. In Slovakia, the situation in relation to minority language use has deteriorated due to the threat of fines imposed under the state language law.<\/p>\n

Systemic disadvantages are overt in the case of the Roma, and subtle yet tangible in the case of other minorities. Recent research has shown that Hungarian minority students perform slightly better than the national average in PISA[1]<\/sup><\/a> tests in Romania but underperform in the state baccalaureate examinations, compared to their Romanian peers. As a result, fewer Hungarians enter higher education, with far-reaching consequences for the whole community. Their poorer results in state examinations are exclusively due to their weaker performance on Romanian literature and language tests, in which subjects they take the same exams as native speakers and are held to the same standards, even though Romanian is a second language for most of them \u2013 a fact state institutions are reluctant to recognize.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Most minorities in the region experience relative social marginalization, meaning that systemic discrimination has a profound effect on the lives of individuals who belong to ethno-national minorities.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most minorities in the region experience relative social marginalization, meaning that systemic discrimination has a profound effect on the lives of individuals who belong to ethno-national minorities. The multifold nature of the social and economic vulnerability of the Roma is well documented. It is less known that relative social marginalization has also been characteristic of other ethno-national minority groups, albeit to a lesser degree than in the case of the Roma minority.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the Roma are the worst affected if their social marginalization is measured using dimensions such as educational attainment. In Romania, only 0.7% of the Roma population had a tertiary degree in 2014, whereas among ethnic Romanians the share of people who had completed higher education was 18.2%. At the same time, minority Hungarians also fared worse than the average population, with only 11% having college degrees.[3]<\/sup><\/a> If one measures personal income, similar disparities can be observed. Only 15% of Roma earned a salary of above 2,000 RON as opposed to 50% of the whole population in 2018, when the average monthly salary was 2,642 RON.[4]<\/sup><\/a> Hungarians, too, earned less than the national average, earning 92.4% of the average salary, which is much less than the 107.3% earned by Romanians in Transylvania (where most Hungarians reside).[5]<\/sup><\/a> Similarly, in Slovakia, 87% of the Roma population are at risk of poverty compared to 13% of the general population.[6]<\/sup><\/a> At the same time, southern regions inhabited by the Hungarian minority recorded both the lowest incomes in the country in 2019 and the highest unemployment rate. These disparities are no coincidence: public investment has systematically avoided these regions.[7]<\/sup><\/a> Economic and social disadvantages are also characteristic of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria, who reside in the poorest towns in the southeast, have a significantly lower employment rate (49.1%) than Bulgarians (67.1%), and are considerably less likely (4.9%) to have a college degree than the ethnic majority (25.6%).[8]<\/sup><\/a> Similarly, apart from shaping the situation of the Muslims in Western Thrace, Greece, a legacy of socio-economic exclusion has also limited the potential of recent efforts by the state to counterbalance the prevailing socio-economic disparities between this minority and the majority population.[9]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

State contempt for minority languages and cultures can translate into outright discrimination, with tangible consequences.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

State contempt for minority languages and cultures can translate into outright discrimination, with tangible consequences. In the Transylvanian town of T\u00e2rgu Mure\u0219, where minority Hungarians constitute 42% of the local population, most schools are so-called mixed-language schools with parallel Romanian and Hungarian classes. However, the linguistic landscape of these schools \u2013 formed by information of public interest, names of classrooms, bulletin boards and homepages \u2013 has been exclusively in the majority language, which runs counter to the relevant legal provisions defined by the law on public administration that grants the right to bilingual public scripts and signs in such institutions.[10]<\/sup><\/a> This has proved to be more than a symbolic problem for local Hungarian pupils, however: the schools\u2019 linguistic landscape reflects the generally marginal status of Hungarian pupils in these schools, who also tend to be allotted classrooms which are in poor physical condition. The unequal distribution of resources and the lack of Hungarian signs in school interiors in mixed-language schools reinforces the asymmetrical power relations between minority and majority students. This hierarchical ordering, reflected as it is in the symbolic and linguistic organization of space, has put minority students in a subordinate position and affected the socialization processes of schoolchildren.[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Minority rights to equal treatment widely violated in CSEE<\/h2>\n

All these minorities have contested the violation of their rights in domestic and European courts over the last two decades.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All these minorities have contested the violation of their rights in domestic and European courts over the last two decades. There is considerable variation in the objectives driving the legal mobilisation of different ethnic groups. While the Roma rights movement is seeking the implementation of basic human \u2013 primarily social \u2013 rights, Muslims in Greece are struggling for official recognition of their ethnic self-identity, and ethnic Hungarians are fighting for linguistic and educational rights. However, being denied rights in practice due to their ethno-national belonging is a unifying experience for all these minority groups. They share the ambition of seeing rights that exist on paper being enforced in practice. This also implies that the systemic problems outlined above with the rule of law weigh more heavily on minorities. Legal uncertainties, combined with an institutional environment hostile to minority claims, make rights largely virtual.<\/p>\n

Being denied rights in practice due to their ethno-national belonging is a unifying experience for all these minority groups. They share the ambition of seeing rights that exist on paper being enforced in practice.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The EU has very little to show with regard to the protection of individuals belonging to these minority groups. In 2020, the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) submitted a citizens\u2019 initiative to the European Commission (Minority SafePack) with 1,320,000 supporting signatures from 11 Member States asking the Commission to initiate legislation for the promotion of minority rights, language rights, and the protection of minority cultures. The request was rejected by the European Commission.[12]<\/sup><\/a> It is not clear why disadvantages stemming from ethno-national belonging should be less of a priority for the EU than discrimination on other grounds, such as gender identity or skin colour. In order to counterbalance gender-based disparities and discrimination, the EU made gender mainstreaming an essential part of its policies and adopted a law on gender equality (Directive 2006\/54\/EC) and gender equality plans. While affirming the importance of these initiatives it is clear that systemic discrimination in the case of ethno-national minorities requires similar institutionalized responses. Of these, only discrimination against the Roma and migrants is addressed by the EU\u2019s legal and policy instruments, such as the monitoring reports of the EU race directive.[13]<\/sup><\/a> Although the EU\u2019s recently adopted anti-racism action plan acknowledges that, besides overt racism against people of colour, \u201cother, less explicit forms of racism and racial discrimination, [\u2026] can be equally damaging\u201d, and that \u201cdiscriminatory behaviours can be embedded in social, financial and political institutions, impacting on the levers of power and on policy-making\u201d, while \u201cstructural racism perpetuates the barriers placed in the way of citizens solely due to their racial or ethnic origin\u201d, it fails to include traditional minorities in this formulation.[14]<\/sup><\/a> However, in the light of the evidence introduced above, it is not only racialized minorities such as Roma or migrants of African descent that suffer the consequences of systemic discrimination; other national minorities do, too, and this is not recognized in these documents. Similarly, while the EU has a specific policy dedicated to the social inclusion of the Roma, it has no comparable policies concerning these other minorities. Generally, national minorities with grievances related to cultural or identity issues are handled as a different category from Roma minorities struggling primarily with social deprivation. However, as demonstrated above, cultural discrimination almost always manifests in some degree of socio-economic marginalization, even if it is to a lesser extent than in the case of Roma minorities.<\/p>\n

Policy recommendations<\/h2>\n

It is therefore time for the EU to put the issue of minorities protection on its agenda.<\/p>\n