BUDAPEST, February 15. /TASS/. The Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe (CoE), will express its opinion with regards to violations of ethnic Hungarians’ rights in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto asserted on Wednesday following a meeting with Secretary General of the Council of Europe Marija Pejcinovic Buric in Strasbourg.
The Hungarian top diplomat said that the Venice Commission, officially known as the European Commission for Democracy through Law, "decided to review the issue of violations of the Hungarian minority’s rights in Transcarpathia following a joint appeal by Hungary and Romania" to the CoE. It is expected that its findings on the issue will be ready by early summer. "The international community, the European Union and other international organizations should make Ukraine take the opinion of the Venice Commission into account," he said in a video address on his Facebook page (owned by the US-based corporation Meta, outlawed as an extremist organization in Russia).
He expressed regret that in recent years, Ukrainian authorities "have been incrementally violating and taking away the rights of the Hungarian national community" in Transcarpathia. According to the official, this was "particularly noticeable in the sphere of education, culture, and governance." A new law enacted in Ukraine at the end of last year will lead to a sharp decline in school instruction in the native language, will deprive the children from the families of ethnic Hungarians of the opportunity to graduate and enter college using their native tongue. Beginning on September 1, 2023, in Ukraine "there will be practically no schools for ethnic minorities but only Ukrainian state schools," he specified.
"We expect Ukraine to restore the right of the Hungarian national community to use its native language," Szijjarto said, adding that all the other rights of ethnic Hungarians in the country should be restored. "I think that this is a simple request and I sincerely hope that the opinion of the Venice Commission will help restore the rights of the Hungarians in Transcarpathia," he concluded.
On Wednesday, in Strasbourg, he also discussed this issue with President of the European Court of Human Rights Siofra O’Leary.