Material for specialized media EURASIA-Net project - EURAC

1. Measures of mainly political character, mainly developed by the European
Parliament, in promotion of cultural diversity and preservation of the cultural
heritage;
2. Measures undertaken by the European Commission, the Council (and the
Parliament), providing financial stimuli (for instance in the area of language
learning);
3. Measures taken in the framework of the EU foreign policy, without touching the
internal sphere of the EU;
4. Policies which do not strictly focus on the protection of (national) minorities but
which are still relevant to the protection of minorities. These include areas such as
human rights policies, anti-racism policy, refugee and asylum policy, employment
policies, measures of social inclusion, regional policy etc.
Among all European institutions (Parliament, Council, Commission, various courts)
the Parliament is the organ which has shown the most intensive interest in national
minority issues. A range of resolutions dealing with ethnic and linguistic minorities
have been approved by the Parliament. Moreover the European Parliament
established already in the 80-ies an Intergroup (that is an unofficial group of
Parliamentarians from different political parties dealing with a specific topic) in the
area of minority protection.
The European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL) based in Dublin, acts as a
lobby group on behalf of the now 40 millions of EU citizens who speak more than 40
minority languages. It also acts as a co-ordination centre for activities related to
minority language. Partly through EBLUL, the EU has commissioned and financed a
considerable number of studies, research and publications on minority issues. The EU in
1987 has also set up the MERCATOR network, tasked with meeting the growing interest in
minority and regional language communities and regional languages in Europe and the
need for these language communities to work together and to exchange experiences.
The network gathers, stores, analyses and distributes relevant information and
documents.
Some way ahead…
In conclusion, we must recall that neither in the EU law system, nor in its external
relations, are there fully binding provisions on the issue of minority protection – with
the most important exception of anti-discrimination law, where the EU has taken an
leading role in order to fight discrimination based on criteria such as ethnic origin or
race. Hence most of the minority involvement of the EU consists of political
declarations and accession criteria. Despite the latter there is no formal reciprocity,
which would compel all EU-member states to implement those criteria in their
internal legal order. Hence, minority protection is not legally defined on a EU level
and equally provided by all member states. As a consequence minority protection is
not yet a part of the so-called “acquis communautaire”, even if developments are
currently moving in this direction. It will primarily depend on the political
opportunities and priorities focused inside the EU-27, if minority issues are to be
reinforced. In political terms it seems quite impossible that the future EU will step
back on this issue being it a significant part of all accession negotiations.
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