Big success of MEPs Lorant Vincze and Valdemar Tomaševski
During today’s plenary session in Brussels, the European Parliament adopted the Minority Safepack resolution, which is important for traditional, autochthonous national minorities. The resolution is a package of proposals of changes for European law, which are supposed to guarantee the protection of autochthonous national minorities and introduce several legal acts of the Union enabling better and more effective preservation of culture, traditions, and education in regions inhabited by national minorities.
Two members of the European Parliament were the leaders and co-authors of this important initiative in the European Parliament – Lorant Vincze, the leader of the Hungarian minority in Romania, and Valdemar Tomaševski, the chairman of the EAPL-CFA and the leader of the Polish minority in Lithuania. Both work together within the European intergroup for traditional national and linguistic minorities.
The European Minority SafePack initiative is a joint project of the Hungarian national minority in Transylvania (Romania) and the Polish national minority in the Vilnius Region (Lithuania), joined by several other traditional national and linguistic communities representing seven European Union states.
The main goals of the Minority SafePack initiative can be summarized as legal security of autochthonous national minorities, ensuring the use of a minority language in schools, state and local government offices, on ballot papers, on informational inscriptions and in public life. The idea is to pay particular attention to regions whose national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics differ from the surrounding regions within the framework of the Union’s cohesion policy. Thanks to this, people belonging to traditional, autochthonous national minorities will enjoy legal protection in the EU.
After the adoption of the Minority SafePack resolution in the European Parliament, the legislative proposals will be forwarded to the European Commission, which has been obliged to develop appropriate amendments to European law that will guarantee full rights to autochthonous national minorities in the European Union.
2020-12-17