Call for safeguard of minority rights in applicant countries

Date: 24/04/1997

AS TALKS on enlarging the Union draw closer, Christian Democrat politicians are calling for strong safeguards for ethnic minorities to avoid conflicts between different linguistic and cultural groups in the applicant countries.

The ability of the would-be members to reassure the Union that effective democratic controls are in place to protect the rights of minorities within their borders is likely to be one of the major political issues addressed in the enlargement negotiations.

Although the EU entry talks will not be launched before the end of the year at the earliest, leading Christian Democrat MEPs believe that the issue must be addressed sooner rather than later.

“It is very important in a context where everything is changing all the time that we look at the situation now and do not wait until it gets worse,” said Italian Christian Democrat MEP Michl Ebner.

Leading Euro MPs from the European People's Party (EPP) are due to meet in Ebner's native South Tyrol at the end of the month to consider what lessons future members can learn from the way the Union has handled similar tensions within its own borders.

“We need to consider what ideas can be drawn from our own experience and which could be taken on board by central and eastern Europe. I believe the question of national minorities has been successfully handled on the Danish-German and Franco-Italian borders, in South Tyrol and in Belgium,” explained Ebner.

Since 1981, the European Parliament has repeatedly stressed the need for adequate legal guarantees for national minorities and languages, and has lobbied governments to ensure stronger commitments are included in the revised treaty which emerges from the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations.

The scale of the issue was underlined earlier this decade when a parliamentary investigation revealed that one person in eight in the Union spoke a language other than the EU's official languages.

In addition, it found a further 12 million citizens were descendants of immigrants speaking non-European languages such as Arabic and Turkish.

Now, with enlargement looming, leading EPP politicians under the chairmanship of former Belgian Premier Wilfried Martens are expected to give their demands extra impetus at the three-day meeting in South Tyrol which begins on Monday (28 April).

Minorities of particular concern to EU observers are Russians in the Baltic states, Italians in former Yugoslavia and Hungarians in Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia.

As they try to establish a suitable framework for protecting minority rights in an enlarged Union, EPP leaders will also draw on the experience of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.

This pan-European body has already agreed a Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities - the first-ever legally binding multilateral instrument providing general protection for national minorities.

By the start of this year, the framework convention had been signed by 34 of the organisation's 40 member states and ratified by eight.