The President of Ukraine signed Law No. 4699-IX on “Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine in Connection with the Update of the Official Translation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.” Finally, a solution has been put forth to a long-standing problem created during the times of Kuchma and Tabachnyk’s rule.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a document intended to preserve the linguistic diversity of Europe. It is not about the rights of national or linguistic minorities, but about the protection of endangered languages.
However, in the Ukrainian law on ratification, the translation of the Charter’s title and its key term were distorted to link this document to the protection of the languages of national minorities. This was done to include the Russian language in the list of languages in the ratification law.
Ukrainian lawyers have for many years demanded to correct this manipulation, as such formulations in the law implied Ukraine’s obligation to protect the Russian language in many areas of public life. This, despite the fact that the Russian language was not threatened, on the contrary, Russification posed a threat to the Ukrainian language and other languages in Ukraine, undermining the linguistic diversity that the Charter is intended to protect.
Last year, the government, following a decision of the Constitutional Court, finally introduced, and the parliament passed, a bill that addressed this issue: the Charter was presented in the correct translation, and Russian was removed from the list of languages protected by the Charter in our country. As well as the non-existent “Moldovan language” – an invention of the Stalinist regime.
Instead, the law further extended protection to several languages that genuinely need this protection. These include, for example, the languages of the Azov Greeks – Urum and Rumeika, as well as the languages of the indigenous peoples of Ukraine – Crimean Tatar and Karaim, which are on the verge of extinction.
Finally, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages will serve the purpose it was written for in our country, rather than the Russification of Ukraine.
