MOSCOW, July 19. /TASS/. Provisions of Ukraine’s state language law that entered into force to introduce new requirements to use the Ukrainian language as the state one in the cultural sphere crudely violate human rights, head of the Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building Andrei Klishas told TASS on Monday.
"The new requirements about the Ukrainian state language are a brazen violation of human rights and freedoms. Unfortunately, the situation, when the Russian-speaking population gets its rights restricted, has been observed for several years now in Ukraine, where Russian speakers, who make up a significant part of the Ukrainian population, have fewer and fewer opportunities to take part in the cultural life of their country in their native Russian language with every year passing," the senator said.
The lawmaker recalled that the law provisions, which instruct to hold cultural, entertainment and spectator events in Ukrainian, entered into force on July 16. The law will be applied to theater productions, exhibitions, guided tours, film screenings and similar events in the cultural sphere.
"Taking into account the statistics, which shows that 31.8% of the Ukrainian population use Russian in their ordinary life, while 20.8% use both Russian and Ukrainian, imposing such a regulation presents an unacceptable manifestation of discrimination against a huge social group," Klishas noted, adding that Kiev fosters situations that will potentially violate the 1997 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
Keeping in mind the global trend aimed at facilitating language exchange and boosting multilingualism, the senator said, "the attempts of Ukrainian authorities to establish independent national statehood by practically taking out radio and cinema products made in a foreign language can be characterized as radical and failing to meet the demand of necessity which is inherent in any truly effective regulator".