#10
RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies
Vol. 3, No. 26, 26 June 2002
DIFFERING PERCEPTIONS OF OUTSIDE INTERVENTION RETARD
PROGRESS ON RUSSIAN MINORITIES.
Observers at sessions of the Council of Europe or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are familiar with the routine: each time a state delegation or an NGO mentions human rights violations allegedly committed by Russia against Chechens or other minorities, Russian officials counter with claims about mistreatment of Russians in the "near abroad," or former Soviet republics, particularly in the Baltics. The OSCE's decision to remove its missions from the Baltic states following a certain amount of progress on such issues as language and citizenship, and the process of accession to the EU has been met with increased Russian complaint of discrimination. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued a plea to OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Rolk Ekeus to help protect minority groups of Russians whose civil rights he said continued to be under attack by "repressive laws," reported strana.ru on 17 June on the eve of the high commissioner's visit to the region.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Yakovenko told RIA-Novosti, "About 700,000 people in those countries have no citizen status and cannot enjoy some fundamental socioeconomic, political, and cultural rights." Strana.ru, characterized by media watchers as close to the Kremlin, quoted Yakovenko as saying that Latvia continued to enforce discriminatory laws on language and education, and the Russian tongue, spoken by 40 percent of the population, had been declared foreign. Yakovenko said the Latvian parliament was refusing to ratify a Council of Europe convention on national minorities, though the country was a signatory to the document. Yakovenko also claimed that in Estonia, laws on aliens, elections, and language were among "filters" barring residents from taking part in political and economic life. The Russian official cited the "outrageous case" of a Russian girl denied emergency medical assistance because she could not explain her condition in Estonian when asked by doctors. He did not provide details, but strana.ru said "evidence of bad behavior was said to be mounting."
The Russian website said such evidence included the case of Tatiana Slivenko over violation of travel rights and infringement of "respect for personal and family life" and a favorable resolution of the case of Ingrida Podkolzina, who was denied the right to run in parliamentary elections on the pretext of poor knowledge of the Latvian language.
When the article from strana.ru was posted on Johnson's List, a popular Internet discussion group about Russia, Pauls Raudseps, editorial-page editor of "Diena," the widest-circulating daily in Riga, challenged strana.ru's information. "In fact, the court has refused to hear eight of the 11 complaints lodged by Ms. Slivenko and her family," wrote Raudseps, "including one regarding a decision by the Latvian authorities that Ms. Slivenko's husband had to leave Latvia in accordance with the 1994 treaty on the withdrawal of the Russian army from Latvia. A verdict on the remaining three complaints is still pending, so in fact up to now the court has not taken any decisions that could be used as proof of bad behavior on Latvia's part."
Raudseps also accused strana.ru of creating the mistaken impression in the case of Podkolzina, which had involved a claim of poor knowledge of Latvian leading to denial of her participation in elections, that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found this restriction to be impermissible. In fact, in its ruling in the Podkolzina case the ECHR explicitly recognized Latvia's right to make knowledge of Latvian a prerequisite for being elected to parliament -- although later Latvia removed this requirement from the law, which Raudseps said was further indication of strana.ru's deliberate distortion. While Raudseps conceded integration issues remained for Latvia, he characterized the article as "misleading" and "counterproductive."
On 13 June, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the state of enlargement negotiations. The provisions concerning minority issues in Latvia have not been changed during the debates, according to "Minority Issues in Latvia," a regular publication of the Latvian Human Rights Committee. European MPs still hope that Latvia will ratify the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and will study the possibility of continuing to provide access to upper-secondary-level education in Russian beyond 2004, said the Human Rights Committee.
Events in the ongoing saga of language and cultural rights and discrimination in Latvia are indicative of how deeply differing perceptions of impartial outside interventions on behalf of the rule of law continue to impede progress. In its 15 April issue, the Latvian Human Rights Committee had described the Podkolzina decision as "the first victory against Latvia" because the ECHR had found violation of electoral rights in the imposition of an additional language exam, despite the existence of a valid language certificate in her case -- although the court had not ruled against the language requirement per se.
The Latvian Human Rights Committee described widely divergent press coverage of the court's decision at that time. "Diena" ran a headline on 10 April, "ECHR Acquits Latvia's Language Policy," and argued that the court "has recognized the legal basis for the election law" and that it "has dismissed complaints under Article 13 and 14" concerning language requirements. By contrast, the Russian-language daily "Vesti Segodnya" claimed that the ECHR has ruled that Latvia had to amend the election legislation and to abolish the language requirements for deputy candidates -- a perception that persists in the media today as evidenced by strana.ru.
Eventually the language requirement was dropped in May, a move praised by the OSCE but which still left some Russian parliamentarians discontent. A group of deputies from the Russian Duma's International Affairs Committee introduced a resolution "on the discriminatory policies of Latvian official institutions regarding Latvia's Russian residents," BNS reported on 3 June (see "RFE/RL Baltic States Report" 17 June 2002). The resolution states that the already complicated situation of Russian-speaking residents in Latvia worsened considerably after the Latvian parliament passed amendments to the constitution in April that bolstered the status of Latvian as the state language and effectively banned the use of Russian in legislative and executive bodies and local governments. The Duma resolution claims the amendments were aimed at the "forced assimilation of Russians and Russian speakers in Latvia."
Clearly, the continued festering of the debate and willful misrepresentation of the nuances in the facts are a cautionary tale about the limited efficacy of strictly legal and human rights remedies to resolve problems of communal strife, and the need for continued social and political dialogue and action. CAF (Compiled by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick)
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