Implementation of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Language Charter: Unified Standard or Divergence?
Implementation of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Language Charter: Unified Standard or Divergence?

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the effectiveness of the European minority protection system through the opinions of Council of Europe’s monitoring bodies. It shows that the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (AC FCNM) and the Committee of Experts of the European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages (CoE ECRML ) have evaluated Slovakia’s performance under these two treaties very differently in the last monitoring cycles. These divergences cannot be explained by differences in the two treaties or by inadequate sources of information, since both bodies received almost identical shadow reports from civil society. This paper concludes that in the examined cases, the CoE ECRML is taking a stricter position on violations of minority rights, while the AC FCNM is much more deferential towards the government’s opinions and formalistic, superficial and dismissive with regard to concern of the minority communities.

• Details
• Contents