Fwd: Петиция за признание русского языка

[William Gardella]

anne marie devlin <anne_mariedevlin at HOTMAIL.COM> writes:

> As stated in the original posting, the main reason for this is the 7
> million or so native-speakers of Russian who are EU citizens.  Many of
> these citizens have been denied language parity in their own countries
> (Estonia, Latvia and Lituania being the most obvious countries).
> Although the reason for the rejection of Russian as an official
> language in these countries is very understandable, it does result in
> a significant percentage of the population essentially being rendered
> voiceless.  With that in mind, there may be a valid case for the EU to
> accept this minority language as an official one; however this would
> undoubtably be a source of great conflict between the member states
> and the EU.
> AM

Codifying Russian as an EU language really wouldn't get to the heart of
the very real problems with language policy or discrimination on the
basis of language; the main effects it would have would be to make EU
legislative and regulatory documents (like the http://europa.eu website)
available in Russian.  Making Russian an official language of the EU
would not give Russian speakers in the EU any better ability to petition
their own governments--the official languages of each member state are
ipso facto official EU languages, but the reverse is not true--and the
EU bureaucracy itself is hardly a well-oiled machine when it comes to
responding to citizen petitions.  In the human rights area, much of that
work is outsourced to non-EU international bodies such as the European
Court of Human Rights (a Council of Europe institution), where access in
Russian is already available.

WGG

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