The Ukrainian parliament’s adoption of the law on education in minority languages is an important step forward for the educational rights of Hungarians in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, the foreign minister said in a Facebook post on Monday.
Foreign Minister Anita Orbán stressed in her post that the Ukrainian parliament’s decision was an important step forward, but the process had not yet been concluded.
“We await the Ukrainian president’s signature, the entry into force of the law and the actual implementation of the commitments,” she wrote.
Update: Since then, President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed the law.
She said she had consulted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on current issues in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations on the margins of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. “The adoption of the Ukrainian legislative amendment affecting the educational rights of national minorities gave our meeting particular significance,” she stressed.
“The decision is the result of many months of persistent Hungarian-Ukrainian negotiations. We worked with the involvement of representatives of the Hungarian community in Transcarpathia to ensure that adequate legal guarantees protect the education of Hungarian children in their mother tongue and the operation of Hungarian schools,” Orbán added in her post.
The Ukrainian law is aimed at settling the educational rights of national minorities. The amendments concern school education, the issuing of education documents, the conduct of external assessments and the preservation of the special status of educational institutions.
The language of instruction will remain Ukrainian. At the same time, in schools where classes are taught in the language of an indigenous people of Ukraine or of a national minority speaking an official EU language, the use of that language alongside the state language is guaranteed in education, as well as in communication between students and other participants in the educational process inside the building and on the grounds of the institution.
The law makes it possible for schools where more than 50 percent of students study in a national minority language that counts as an official language of the EU to be granted the status of national minority educational institution.
The law’s adoption will facilitate the opening of the second and third clusters of the European Union’s accession negotiations with Ukraine, after Hungary signalled last week that it would not stand in the way of the launch of a new, for now technical stage of the negotiations if the Ukrainian parliament approved the law.
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