National minorities need positive discrimination
Autochthonous national minorities need positive discrimination for genuine equal opportunities - said Csaba Sógor during the European Parliament's plenary on Wednesday evening. The DAHR representative expressed his opinion that the 2017 report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) does not deal with national minorities.
As part of the mini-plenary session in Brussels on Wednesday, the Parliament debated on the framework for the functioning of the FRA between 2018 and 2022. Csaba Sógor warned that the draft Council decision on the activities of FRA concerns all types of discrimination, as set out in Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, including language and ethnicity-based discrimination.
According to the MEP, the Agency acted as if national minorities did not exist at all in the European Union, in spite of the fact that - if we consider language minorities - we talk about 60 million EU citizens.
"While the 2017 annual report deals with other minority groups in separate chapters, the problems of national minorities do not appear. It is time to realize that equal treatment does not mean equal opportunities, indigenous national minorities need positive discrimination for real equality of opportunity and FRA should play an important role in this", said the MEP.
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights was established in 2007 with the aim of providing expertise and support in terms of fundamental rights for EU and member state institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies in the implementation of EU law. The tasks assigned to the Agency cover collection and analysis of information and data, cooperation with the civil society and awareness-raising actions in connection with fundamental rights.
