Tag: ethnic minorities

France abided by a European Commission deadline at the last minute by submitting information on how it intends to align its national legislation with EU laws on the free movement of people just before midnight on 15-16 October. But the country remains under scrutiny to determine whether its summer crackdown on illegal Roma camps amounted to discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, the Commission said.

The European Commission should continue to provide information in non-official EU languages, MEPs urged this week (15 March), expressing disappointment that Russian-language fact-sheets produced by the EU executive's offices in Latvia were recently withdrawn.

Catalan, Basque, Galician, Welsh and Scots Gaelic should be made official languages of the European Union, MEPs said last week, accusing Brussels of failing to protect "the rights of millions of speakers of non-official EU languages" and calling on the EU institutions to do "much more" to promote multilingualism.  

The European Commission should use legal changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty to protect the rights of linguistic minorities in the European Union, Latvian MEP Tatjana Zdanoka has urged.

Local elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina yesterday (5 October) confirmed deep ethnic divisions within the Balkan country, which is seen as a natural candidate for EU accession.

The decentralisation of Serbia by giving more authority to municipalities could benefit minority groups that constitute a local majority, argues Beata Huszka in a July 2007 policy brief for the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS).