The United Nations is not the only international institution that provides harmful advice to Latvia on sensitive language policy issues. In March, the Committee of Ministers at Deputy level of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution in which Latvia was sharply criticized for the requirements of the state language and told that it was necessary to further expand the use of the Russian language.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to see the silver lining of every cloud and is optimistic in its statement on this resolution: “The Council of Europe’s Council of Ministers at Deputy level gives a positive evaluation of Latvia’s policy for society integration”. In reality, however, integration policy is criticized to the max in this document.
We are talking about a resolution adopted by the Committee of Ministers at Deputy level of the Council of Europe "on the implementation of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities by Latvia", adopted on March 3, 2021.
It must be made clear that this Council of Europe is not the same thing as the European Council that takes decisions on behalf of the governments of the European Union when it comes to dealing with the overall EU budget. The Council of Europe is a wider organization of 47 countries whose main concern is human rights. All its Member States are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe is, in essence, something like the United Nations, whose decisions are taken into account or ignored by countries, depending on their content. And in this particular case, Latvia must ignore the recommendations of the Council of Europe regarding the wider use of the Russian language, which would inevitably damage the positions of the state language.
In its public statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasizes only the positive. "The Resolution positively evaluates Latvia’s achievements in the field of the integration of society, including the following:
* support for adults seeking to improve their Latvian language skills, as a result of which more than 90% of respondents whose first language is Russian know Latvian.
* broad support for national minority cultural events, which has facilitated maintaining and developing their cultural identity;
* a diverse media environment, with content across a broad spectrum available through traditional and electronic media in languages spoken by national minorities;
* support for national minority educational programmes through continued state funding for national minority education in seven languages (Russian, Belarusian, Estonian, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian); and furthermore, such funding has increased over recent years in view of the higher costs of the educational process and the needs of schools with small numbers of students;
* the diminishing number of “non-citizens”, including due to naturalisation procedures for various groups of society and the granting of Latvian citizenship to all newborns."
The resolution indeed does mention these positive things. Even the fact that the Mikhail Chekhov Russian Theater operates in Riga, which produces plays in Russian. However, the section of the resolution that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentions only in passing is much more detailed and extensive. The one in which Latvia is criticized. And there the overseas advisers have written nonsense that in the conditions of Latvia would be a threat to the existence of the Latvian language and the Latvian people.
As usual, this important document is only available in the languages of the major nations - English, French. However, the official government-funded translation robot hugo.lv can help translate it into Latvian. And here are some broader quotes from the Council of Europe resolution.
This document shows a complete lack of understanding of the historical situation in Latvia:
"Restrictive policies and other pressures driven by a political agenda, rather than evidence-based decision-making, are particularly evident in the education system, the media, and with regard to the use of national minority languages in many areas of public life."
The Council of Europe is not happy that employees in Latvia are required to know the state language:
“Increasingly strict Latvian language proficiency requirements are applied to virtually all professions and positions included in the classification of professions. Such broad scope of application of linguistic requirements adversely affects the possibility for non-native speakers of Latvian, including, in particular, persons belonging to national minorities, of accessing many positions within the public service. Language proficiency requirements have been used to terminate mandates of elected municipal council members. Moreover, since February 2017, members of ruling boards of NGOs are required to be proficient in the Latvian language at C1 level. These language proficiency requirements constitute impediments to civic participation and freedom of association. "
The Council of Europe is not happy that not everyone who vaguely wishes can convert into a Latvian:
"Persons seeking to indicate ethnic affiliation in their personal identity documents are required, by law, to provide documents which confirm kinship with a direct ascendant confirming their ethnicity. Furthermore, a person wishing to change his/her ethnicity record to “Latvian” is obliged to prove “the highest (third) level of fluency in the official language”. Establishment of such a difficult procedure to change one’s ethnicity record to Latvian can be viewed as an exclusion mechanism. Consequently, the possibility of indicating one’s ethnic affiliation (even voluntarily) in personal identity documents risks running counter to the aim and spirit of the Framework Convention."
The Council of Europe is not happy that street names are not in Russian and that there is no bilingualism in public administration. And unlike the UN recommendations, they use the word "bilingualism":
“The situation with regard to the use of minority languages in dealings with the administrative authorities, in topographical signs and other inscriptions, and in the transcription of personal names in other languages into Latvian and their use in personal documents, has not changed in Latvia during the current monitoring cycle. Denying the possibility of using national minority languages in these circumstances neglects the significant symbolic value for societal integration that such bilingualism carries for persons belonging to national minorities, as an affirmation of their presence as an equal and integral part of society."
The Council of Europe is not happy with the restriction of bilingualism in Russian schools:
“Schools using national minority languages have come under increased pressure to increase the use of the Latvian language in teaching. As of the 2017-2018 school year, all students, including those who had studied in national minority programmes, are obliged to sit the centralised exams in subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, information technology, geography and economics, in the Latvian language. Additionally, children taking grade 9 exams no longer benefit from having a choice of language in which the tasks are presented. Plans to reduce the scope of national minority language teaching to 20% of lesson hours per week by the 2020/2021 school year in grades 7 to 9 and to reduce teaching only to lessons of minorities’ own languages and ethno-cultural subjects in grades 10 to 12 are of particular concern. Furthermore, the introduction in 2015-2016 of “loyalty clauses” for teachers and school directors creates a climate of suspicion and apprehension, which is not conducive to the building of trust among different segments of society."
The European Council resolution also states that the recommendations mainly concern the Russians:
"Society in Latvia continues to struggle with the consequences of past divisions, with the principal national groups - the Latvian majority and the Russian minority - holding different geopolitical viewpoints and cultural identities. Persons belonging to each of these groups have significantly different perceptions of history and of the State in which they would wish to live.”
With the exception of the Russians, the only minority that receives special attention in the Council of Europe's recommendations is the Roma, who are indeed the only long-discriminated minority in Latvia. With regard to them, the Council of Europe instructs to “step up efforts to identify and remedy the shortcomings faced by Roma children in the field of education with a view to ensuring that they have equal opportunities for access to all levels of quality education; take measures to prevent Roma children from being wrongfully placed in special schools."
In general, this is the vision of the Council of Europe on Latvia's national policy, language, education and culture. Apart from the mentioned discrimination against the Roma, the published opinion is incompetent and superficial. It is very likely that in this case, as with UN recommendations, pro-Kremlin organizations and Kremlin influence agents were called in as advisers. What happens next? Fortunately, neither the UN recommendations nor the recommendations of the Council of Europe are comparable to European Union regulations, which are mandatory laws, or directives that allow certain interpretations when implemented, but they must be complied with anyway.
The UN recommendations on the need for bilingualism in education, and even more so the Council of Europe's recommendations for the wider use of Russian in all areas of public life, must simply be thrown in the trash.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of course, puts this plan in more diplomatic phrases:
"These recommendations are of an advisory nature. The adoption of the Resolution concludes the third monitoring cycle concerning the implementation of the Convention in Latvia. The government will continue dialogue with the Council of Europe under the next monitoring cycle, which will begin with the transmission of a State report in the autumn of 2021."
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