Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-25-Speech-2-185"
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"en.20051025.20.2-185"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, our rejoicing at the positive steps that Romania and Bulgaria have taken on the road towards the European Union make us all the more entitled to talk about the things that cannot be seen in a positive light and deserve some measure of criticism.
According to the Commission, the political criteria have been met; I do not believe that they have been in every respect. The law on minorities, to which reference is made in the Commission’s report, was yesterday voted down in the Senate, as Mr Duka-Zólyomi has already said. These rules in relation to minorities were, in practical terms, absolute minimum requirements, and even they were rejected. I regard that as shameful and as a flagrant about-turn on the road towards compliance with the Copenhagen criteria.
I have to tell Commissioner Rehn that, although I take a very favourable view of the large amount of space devoted to the Roma in the report, I do believe that the one and a half million Hungarians in Romania would have merited at least as much attention in it, and that it would have been better if their situation had been considered in rather more detail. Although the report discusses higher education, it fails, for example, to mention the fact that higher education is privately funded from abroad, and that the Romanian state therefore makes no money available for it, or that its failure to pay anything towards higher education in Hungarian constitutes a failure to comply with the Copenhagen criteria, and one that has as a consequence the fact that, of the 6.6% of the Romanian population who constitute the Hungarian minority, only 1.6% have completed college education. What this means is that the education system is keeping an ethnic group, and one comprising more people than some Member States of the European Union, at the bottom of the pile.
Let me conclude by saying that this House, in the Moscovici report, called for better protection for minorities. We therefore need, ‘while maintaining the principles of subsidiarity and self-government, to ensure the protection of the Hungarian minority’. The Romanian Parliament and Government have, so far, voted to reject the initiatives the Commission has taken to this effect; here, too, action is needed, and I ask Commissioner Rehn to use what influence he has to this end."@en1
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