Ukraine's current language policy violates the rights of national minorities and introduces elements of discrimination, and new authorities have yet to solve this problem, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Lamberto Zannier said in an interview with Izvestia.
According to Zannier, one of today's problems is implementing recommendations of the Council of Europe - such as differentiating between the languages of the European Union and all others. This classification suggests that unequal policies are applied to different minorities, he said in regards to disagreements around the Russian language in Ukraine.
The OSCE High Commissioner stressed that the recently adopted law on the Ukrainian language as a state language, which says nothing about protecting minority languages, was adopted without any consultation with minority representatives.
He also noted that the OSCE department that deals with the issue of language policy, is working to eliminate a number of distortions in the previously adopted law and considers it reasonable to create a mechanism of systematic interaction that would allow to take into account concerns of national minorities.
