“Dictation in the Russian Language” in Latvia, Alexander Filey, are threatened with
five years in prison.
We demand the intervention of the UN High Commissioner for National
Minorities in both of these specific cases, which are evidence of racism in Europe,
as well as the discriminatory language policies of these countries, which completely
neglect the human values that the UN Human Rights Council is called upon to
defend.
We demand the UN High Commissioner for National Minorities includes in
his report to the 74th session of the UN Human Rights Council a report on the
observance of the rule of law and the absence of segregation bias in the criminal
prosecution of the persons mentioned above, as well as a report of on the facts of
social segregation according to language in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Considering that the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine and the Baltic
countries should be granted the same linguistic rights as those granted to Ukrainians
and Crimean Tatars living in Crimea since 2014, we suggest holding an annual
regional European Regional Forum of National Minorities in Russia, in the Republic
of Crimea, in order to study practices in the education in and teaching of minority
languages provided today to national minorities in Crimea.