MOSCOW, September 20 (Itar-Tass) - Moscow hopes that the European Union will finally attend to the problem of the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic countries, Russian foreign ministry’s envoy for human rights, democracy and supremacy of law Konstantin Dolgov said on Friday.
“Regrettably, what we are seeing in the area of human rights in the European Union and what we are hearing in response to Russia’s concerns demonstrates that our European and American partners are making a wide use of the practice of double standards in this area,” he said at the seventh regional conference of Russian compatriots from the Baltic states in Tallinn.
“Otherwise it is impossible to explain why the European Union and the United States, which are so ardently advocating human rights outside their territories and sometimes overreacting to obvious or even alleged violations in third countries, are absolutely indifferent to the disgraceful problem of the mass citizenshiplessness in Latvia and Estonia. The situation when a big portion of the population of these countries have no basic political and certain socio-economic rights cannot be considered as acceptable from any point of view,” he said.
“The abnormality of the situation is that Latvia’s and Estonia’s non-citizens are deprived of the right to vote but seats in the European Parliament are allocated to these countries depending on the total population,” Dolgov noted. “We hope that the European Union will finally attend to this problem. We shall keep a close eye on this issue in the context of the next elections to the European Parliament due in 2014.”
According to the Russian diplomat, Russian diplomats have been repeatedly raising problems of the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic countries at their meetings with leaders of sectoral international organization, representatives from the European Union and its member states and the United States. “This work will be continues,” he pledged.