Madam Chair, My name is Vyacheslav Likhachev, and I’m OHCHR minority fellow from Ukraine, and I’m grateful for opportunity to be here and to share our experience in promotion languages and literature of the national minorities. I will tell only one success story; we have more. In our system of formal school education in Ukraine we have a format of national competitions for teenagers, we call it Olympiads. Olympiads devoted to different subjects of school curriculum like mathematics, biology, Ukrainian language and literature, or history. It is one of the best institutional practice to promote interest on studying and to motivate the best students. These competitions have a serious official status. Even participation in Olympiad is prestigious. Winners on the national level have a bonus during University entrance. In 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity, my organization, the Congress of Ethnic Communities of Ukraine, has initiated communication with the Ministry of education about including national minorities' languages and literature in this format. The Government has agreed with our suggestion. As a result, in addition to 26 subjects of official Olympiads have appeared Olympiads on Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Bolgarian, Moldovian and Hebrew languages and literature also. In 2015 those competitions were held on official level with government recognition and finansial support for the first time and become Annual. Establishing of the Olympiads for schoolchildren on national minorities' languages and literature means not only possibility for selfrealisation for children and motivation to learn those subjects. It means an official recognition national minorities' languages in the state's formal educational system. Also, the need to develop programs and tasks for Olympiads stimulated pedagogical and methodological work in the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine. It creates context when it is prestigious to learn national minorities' languages in schools. As far as I know, this practic is unique in Eastern Europe.

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