Recent violations of the rights of linguistic minorities in the EU have been causing serious concern, as they are becoming commonplace rather than isolated incidents.
Latvian MP case
An administrative case has been opened against Latvian MP Aleksejs Rosļikovs, who spoke in Russian in the country’s parliament, according to Latvian Justice Minister Inese Lībiņa-Egnere.
Rosļikovs’s statements “call into question the status of Latvian as the only official language” and “threaten Latvian statehood and divide society,” she said on social media. “There are more of us! Russian is our language!” Rosļikovs said in the Latvian parliament yesterday.
His behaviour will be investigated by the Latvian State Language Centre, which is under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Justice and involved in the implementation of language policy. If the case is reclassified as criminal, the Centre will co-operate with the Latvian police, Lībiņa-Egnere noted.
In late May, the Latvian parliament adopted amendments to its internal regulations, according to which parliamentarians must use only Latvian as the official language in their work premises and when communicating with citizens. The use of foreign languages in the Seimas building will be classified as an “illegal act.”
Violations of the rights of linguistic minorities
Modern Europe sees lots of examples of successful economic and political development of multilingual and multicultural communities, for example quadrilingual Switzerland. Nevertheless, language conflicts, many of which have existed for centuries, continue to complicate the process of creating a unified multicultural Europe.
In 2022, Latvia drafted and adopted a law amending the country’s education system, which requires all pre-school and school institutions, including bilingual and minority language institutions, to switch to teaching exclusively in Latvian. According to the new law, this transition must take place by September 2025. And by September 2023, all preschoolers and first, fourth and seventh graders will receive instruction exclusively in Latvian.
These amendments, which severely restrict minority language education, are contrary to international human rights standards, including the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of language and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,” independent UN experts said.
There were many calls in Latvia to withdraw the bill from consideration until a decision was made on the complaints filed by its opponents with the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. Nevertheless, the bill was passed by the Latvian parliament without significant changes in September 2022.
At the same time, the “language inquisitors” were deeply outraged by the English inscriptions at railway stations in Sigulda and Jurmala: Departure, Route, Platform, Number, Arrival. In the summer of 2014, the State Language Centre initiated an administrative violation case due to the non-use of the long vowel sign required by Latvian grammar in the massive concrete letters RĪGA at the entrance to the capital. Instead of this sign, a white and blue heart was attached above the letter i. In response to the complaint, the Riga City Council stated that the lower part of the symbolic heart served as the long vowel sign.
In Latvia, there are fines ranging from 35 to 250 euros for insufficient knowledge of the Latvian language, according to language inspectors. Madara Rēke, deputy director of the Latvian State Language Centre, admitted that inspectors sometimes check specific employees based on complaints from “vigilant citizens,” who may report not only poor knowledge of Latvian, but also a Russian accent.
Earlier, the State Education Content Centre (VISC) dismissed senior expert Rita Kursite for publicly speaking out on LTV’s Panorāma programme against the ban on anything related to Russia in educational materials and for defending the Russian language.
Russians in the Baltics: A minority or a significant part of the community
The UN experts were particularly concerned about the consequences of the implementation of new provisions for Russian speakers, who make up a significant part of Estonia’s population. Despite protests from parents and children, the Estonian authorities have closed a number of Russian-language schools in recent years.
Former Latvian President Egils Levits, speaking to the Seimas in June 2021, called for an end to “multilingualism” in the country. He explained that by this he meant the systematic elimination of the Russian language from economic and public life. The reason turned out to be surprisingly simple: national minorities allegedly discriminate against Latvians in the labour market and prevent them from obtaining prestigious positions, as Russian is still considered a significant advantage.
In 2023, the Estonian government fully confirmed the plan approved by the previous cabinet to effectively eliminate Russian-language schools in the coming years by switching them to the state language.
The number and proportion of Russians grew significantly during the Soviet period, and according to the 1989 census, Russians made up 9.4% of the population in Lithuania, 30% in Estonia, and 34.0% in Latvia, being the largest national minority in all three republics.
After Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia gained independence, the number and proportion of Russians in these countries fell sharply due to both emigration and natural decline, which exceeded the natural decline of the titular population in percentage terms. With the exception of a number of areas bordering Russia and Belarus, the Russian population of the Baltic countries is concentrated in cities.
The Baltic republics have basic laws that determine the development of the Baltic countries: laws on citizenship, the state language and foreigners, which discriminate against the Russian population. Discrimination against Russians in the Baltic states as a linguistic minority is expressed in the gradual narrowing of the sphere of application of the Russian language. Although Russians and Russian speakers make up a significant part of the population of Estonia and Latvia, they are denied the right to use Russian in government institutions, including in areas where they live in large numbers, have limited access to education in Russian, and are denied the right to receive official information about Russia.
View from Europe
International organisations have criticised Latvia and Estonia for failing to respect the rights of Russians for several decades. They have no right to interfere directly in national legislation and therefore have no real influence on political decision-making — resolutions on discrimination are purely advisory in nature.
In 2021, after examining the situation of national minorities in Latvia, the Council of Europe saw a threat in its decision to switch Russian schools to Latvian, in the tightening of the law on the state language, and in the failure to respect the rights of people with purple passports. According to the organisation’s representatives, the authorities are deliberately neglecting their obligations to provide social protection for their compatriots and are thus only hindering their integration into society.
Similar calls have been made by the organisation in the past, including to Estonia. In 2015, the Council of Europe demanded that every effort be made to reduce the number of non-citizens as much as possible and to repeal the law on fines for not knowing Estonian.
However, these demands are only recommendations, and the authorities of both Baltic countries have stated outright that they do not intend to comply with them in any way. This is probably why Russian communities, desperate for justice, have begun to file complaints with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). All cases accepted for consideration concern the closure or reduction of Russian schools and violations of children’s rights to education in their native language.
Over the past few years, thousands of parents of schoolchildren, human rights defenders and activists have signed these complaints. The court only began considering the first complaints in March 2021.
The main problem is that international human rights bodies, including the ECHR, take a formal approach to language disputes, limiting themselves to procedural issues — that is, they do not consider whether language policy is discriminatory in general towards a particular national minority.
At the same time, due to the absence of the concept of “language rights” in international treaties, states are given very broad powers to pursue policies in this area. As a result, the Latvian and Estonian authorities justify their language policies with the “legitimate” aim of preventing the “undermining of sovereignty” and “national unity.”
“Latvia is the only place in the world where the Latvian language can be guaranteed, and in this connection, the main nation exists and develops. Restricting the use of Latvian as the state language within the territory of the state is unacceptable and may also be considered a threat to the democratic system,” the Latvian Constitutional Court ruled on December 21, 2001.
Minority SafePack Initiative rejected
The EU has also expressed formal concern about the oppression of national minorities in the Baltic republics. In the early 2010s, the European Parliament launched the so-called Minority SafePack, an initiative aimed at protecting the rights of national minorities throughout the Union. It provided guarantees for education, freedom of the press and the elimination of legal inequality for members of national communities.
However, the deputies were unable to transform the document into specific legislative acts — the European Commission repeatedly refused to approve all resolutions on this matter and ultimately left their implementation to the governments of EU member states. In other words, the EU could have decided at the legislative level that national minorities could legally have their own kindergartens, schools, hospitals and self-government bodies. In this case, the Latvian and Estonian authorities would have been forced to comply.
Meanwhile, on Friday, the European Court of Justice rejected the latest appeal initiated by Minority SafePack, according to Loránt Vincze, Member of the European Parliament, President of the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) and Chair of the Intergroup on Minorities in the European Parliament. He called the decision another disappointment for the protection of national minorities at the European level and noted that the issue of ethnic minorities remains on the periphery of the EU agenda.
While some MPs are fighting for human rights, others are initiating unfounded cases in an attempt to punish activists fighting for language rights. No country in the world, especially a EU country country, which is a model of tolerance and democracy, has the right to put pressure on linguistic minorities and violate their rights, experts believe.
