The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), on the initiative of Hungary and Romania, will appeal to the Venice Commission on the situation of national minorities in Ukraine.
This was stated by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó, who on February 15, together with his Romanian colleague Bogdan Aurescu, visited the PACE headquarters in Strasbourg, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The Hungarian minister made this statement after a meeting with PACE Secretary General Maria Pejčinović-Burich, so most likely it will be she who will address the Venice Commission.
“We sincerely hope that the international community, the European Union and international organizations will force Ukraine to implement the commission’s decision, as has happened many times in the case of Hungarian legislation,” Szijjártó said, referring to the fact that Kiev has still not implemented the recommendations of the Venice Commission on the Law on Languages of 2019.
The head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry also noted that in the last seven or eight years, Hungarian-Ukrainian relations were mainly determined by the policy of Kyiv, which “step by step violated and took away the rights of the Hungarian national community.” According to him, the final decision of the commission should be prepared by June of this year.
Apparently, it is not PACE, whose next plenary meeting will take place only in April 2023, who will turn to Venice, but PACE Secretary General Maria Pejčinović-Burich, with whom Peter Szijjártó met on February 15 in Strasbourg.
Also, the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry held a meeting with the former long-term head of the Venice Commission, and now its special representative, Gianni Buquicchio.
The joint proposal of Hungary and Romania to appeal to the Venice Commission was supported by the relevant PACE committee during the plenary session of the assembly at the end of January 2022.
It is worth noting that on February 15, Gergely Guyás, head of the office of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said that the Hungarian authorities are “doing everything possible” to help the residents of Transcarpathia, and added that “every Hungarian has a responsibility for every other Hungarian, where no matter how he lives." As you know, the Hungarian community lives compactly in the Transcarpathian region, numbering more than 100 thousand people.
Let us remind you that the Venice Commission is an advisory body of the Council of Europe on constitutional issues. The main form of the commission’s work is the analysis of laws and bills of participating states that affect problems of constitutional law, including election standards, minority rights, etc.
Как reported “PolitNavigator”, when Vladimir Zelensky arrived at the EU summit, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer did not applaud.