MOSCOW, July 22. /TASS/. Kiev’s policy aimed at mandating the Ukrainian language in all areas of life and discriminating against Russian runs counter to Council of Europe conventions and the country’s obligations within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to which Moscow will keep drawing the attention of European human rights agencies, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Thursday.
According to her, the new provisions of Ukraine’s law on the state language, which have taken effect recently, as well as the signing of the law on indigenous peoples by the country’s president, "encroach on the Ukrainian people’s desire to speak Russian, the native language of most of the population."
"These new discriminatory steps that the Ukrainian authorities have taken violate the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities, as well as the OSCE’s fundamental documents," the Russian diplomat added.
"We are frustrated with how OSCE and Council of Europe agencies keep turning a blind eye to the constant discrimination against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman noted. "This kind of double standards are at odds with the goals of these organizations and undermine their authority as all-European platforms," Zakharova added.
"We have no intention of slowing down our efforts to draw the attention of OSCE and Council of Europe human rights mechanisms to Ukraine’s blatant violations of its obligations to protect the rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities," Zakharova stressed. "We will continue to demand that project coordinators and the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine keep an eye on the situation of ethnic minorities and reflect all encroachments on their rights and freedoms in their reports," Zakharova emphasized.