UN's Fernand de Varennes: Good practice to recognise minority language as official if large minority

United Nations Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes Thursday told a press conference in Targu Mures that if a national minority in a country is numerous enough it is good practice to recognise the language of that minority as an official language.

Canada is in a situation in which approximately 24 percent of the population speaks French and it therefore decided for English and French to be official languages but when a large percentage of the population in a country, even if a minority, it is a large one, than I would say it is good practice to recognise the language of the respective minority as official language. Italy, in certain regions, has more than one official language, because it has large minorities speaking other languages. Thus, if a minority is large enough proportionally and speaks another language, then I believe that indeed, there must be the principle of proportionality, Fernand de Varennes stated, when asked about the Canadian experience in the field.

Fernand de Varennes showed that in the minority education field in Ontario, because his mandate focuses on this subject, there is "an interesting situation" after the establishment of the new regional government that has decided to give up the setting up of a French-teaching university.

As a personal observation, Fernand de Varennes mentioned that in New Brunswick there is a university with exclusively French teaching for a minority of about 250,000 people, while in Ontario there is no such state university for 600,000 speakers of French.

So, there are human rights issues here too. I am not saying that these rights have been breached, but I think there is room for better in Canada too, the situation could be improved, he said.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues visited Romania 4 to 6 December, at the invitation of the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) and the Union of the Hungarian Civil Organisations in Transylvania (MACISZESZ), in order to participate in the conference "Minority Hungarian communities: problems and opportunities," that took place in Cluj-Napoca and Targu Mures.AGERPRES(RO - author: Dorina Matis, editor: Antonia Nita; EN - author: Simona Iacob, editor: Maria Voican)