Let’s act against the decline of linguistic diversity in Europe & for the promotion of national and linguistic minority rights!” called the conference held on the 7th of September in the European Parliament.
The cross-party Conference, which aimed to bring together actors and stakeholders working for the promotion and protection of linguistic diversity and national and linguistic minority rights, was opened by Fernand De Varennes. The UN Special Rapporteur for Minorities made it clear once again that minority rights are human rights, even if in some places they are not considered so, and this is especially true to linguistic rights.
In his opinion what we see today is not evolution, not even stagnation, but a regress in minority rights in Europe, in most cases regarding language and education rights. “It is concerning that despite the support of more than one million people, the European Parliament and many national and regional parliaments, the European Commission decided to simply reject the Minority SafePack Initiative. This is not a coherent decision”, said Mr. de Varennes.