A/HRC/55/51/Add.2 B. Linguistic minorities 52. Despite the constitutional and legislative provisions in which the cultural, religious and linguistic diversity of Tajikistan is recognized, the practice on the ground in relation to the languages of minorities – outside of Russian, which has a unique status and history in Tajikistan, and English, which is increasingly used in public services catering to tourists and other foreigners, at least in the capital – is one of prohibition and exclusion. 53. Strictly speaking, there is no place or provisions for the use of minority languages (other than Russian and English) outside of education. That means that, to all intents and purposes, a language such as Uzbek, which is shared by a large percentage of the country’s population (about 12 per cent) cannot be officially used, even in areas in which it is widely spoken, for access to public health and social services and other important public services, including radio and television broadcasts. As indicated by numerous global and regional instruments, such denial could be in breach of the prohibition of discrimination.17 On a more positive note, using minority languages in such situations would mean hiring civil servants who are bilingual and fluent in them, which would in turn create significant employment opportunities for members of those minorities and counter what some have suggested to the Special Rapporteur are attempts to impose the exclusive use of the Tajik language and involuntarily assimilate minorities. 54. The situation naturally spills over into the attitude of parents, who may view their own languages unfavourably and decide there is no future or opportunity for their children, except in Tajik and, to some extent, Russian or English, and who therefore make the decision to forego their own identities and send their children to schools in which only Tajik is used. 55. Nevertheless, Tajikistan provided education in minority languages until recently, managing such education relatively well, although there are always areas for improvement, especially in the light of the signalling of a move away from education in the language of minorities. 56. While there are public schools or classes that provide education in the main minority languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Kyrgyz and Turkmen, among others, the number of schools teaching in minority languages has been declining recently. For example, the number of students learning in Uzbek at school declined from almost 300,000 children in the 2011/12 academic year to only about 106,000 children in the 2020/21 academic year, with the number of Uzbek classes over the same period decreasing from 14,039 to 5,178. Data for the period 2022–2023 provided to the Special Rapporteur by the Ministry of Education, which still needs to be examined more closely, indicates 23,187 students in 77 schools in which Uzbek is the language of instruction and 97,785 students learning in 314 schools in which both Tajik and Uzbek are used. Other sources raised doubts as to the accuracy of those statistics, which remain preliminary. 57. There is also the problem of the mismatch between the national curricula requirements and the textbooks available to schools using minority languages as a medium of instruction, especially in languages other than Russian. Since 2000, all schools teaching in minority languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Kyrgyz and Turkmen, must follow the curriculum and teaching programmes of Tajikistan. They are not provided with updated teaching materials or programmes in minority languages by the relevant national education institutions, such as the Education Development Institute, however. In many cases, they have to use materials from outside of Tajikistan, for example, from Uzbekistan, or out-of-date Soviet-era textbooks. In a several subjects, teachers who teach in Russian, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen are forced to translate the teaching programmes provided by the Government from the Tajik language into their own languages. Linguistic minority communities speaking Uzbek, 17 12 “Where minorities are concentrated above a certain percentage in a given territory, region or local administration, they have the right to use their language in administrative and other public service areas to an appropriate and proportionate degree … In applying the proportional principle, the employment of bilingual or multilingual employees to provide public services in minority languages increases inclusion and the participation of minorities in public life.” (Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation (Geneva, OHCHR, 2017), p. 25. GE.24-00946