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The Committee
concludes that Ms. Ignatane has suffered specific injury in being prevented from standing
for the local elections in the city of Riga in 1997, because of having been struck off the
list of candidates on the basis of insufficient proficiency in the official language. The
Human Rights Committee considers that the author is a victim of a violation of article 25,
in conjunction with article 2 of the Covenant.
The second case
is Podkolzina vs. Latvia, judged by the
European Court of Human Rights. (23) It also
regards the need of having the linguistic certificate to be able to stand for the
elections. Ms. Podkolzina, a native Russian speaker, was a deputy candidate from the
People's Harmony Party (the pro-minority coalition For Human Rights in United Latvia) in
the parliamentary elections held in October 1998. On 21 August 1998 the Central Electoral
Commission struck Ms. Podkolzina from the electoral list on the basis of a provision of
the Election Law, viz., because of "insufficient state language proficiency".
The decision was taken after the State Language Centre issued the ruling that Ms.
Podkolzina's state language proficiency did not correspond to the third level. The
reference was based on the results of an examination held by a state language inspector on
7 August 1998, despite the fact that Ms. Podkolzina, like Ms. Ignatane, possess a required
third level valid state language proficiency certificate.
Although the
Latvian authorities had not contested the validity of that document, the applicant had
nevertheless been required to provide a further certificate of proficiency. The assessment
had been left to the discretion of a single language inspector, whose powers were
considered excessive by the Court. Consequently, it considered that, in the absence of any
objective guarantees, the procedure followed in the applicants case was incompatible
with the procedural requirements of fairness and legal certainty in determining
eligibility for election.
It is, of course,
not for the Court to determine the choice of the working language of a national
parliament,
.as that choice was dictated by historical and political
considerations and, in principle, was exclusively for the State concerned to
determine
, but at the same time the applicant held a valid language
certificate which showed that it was possible for her to participate in the activity of
the Saeima (Parliament) with no major problem.
The Court accordingly held unanimously that there had been a violation of Article 3 of
Protocol No. 1 (right to free elections). (24)
Thus, although
the principles enshrined in the State Language Law are fully legitimate, this is not the
case for the concrete applications that some civil servants have undertaken. In fact, the
linguistic inspectors in both cases abused their position to deny a
fundamental right to two citizens. The impact of those cases must have been relevant,
because the Saeima decided, on 9 May 2002, to
abolish the state language requirements for deputy candidates in parliamentary and
municipal elections.
This concession
seems to be compensated by the revision affecting Article 18 of the Constitution, which
now has a new provision according to which every Member of the Saeima is obliged to give a loyalty oath which
includes the promise to strengthen the Latvian language as the sole state
language.
Another
fundamental piece of the linguistic policy in Latvia has been brought before
the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the education reform scheduled for 2004 which
will cease state support for secondary education in minority languages. (25) It is hard
to foresee how the Court will react, but if it is true that the application was submitted
arguing that the right to choose the language of teaching has been neglected, then the
claim has poor prospects, given the precedent of the Belgian
Linguistic Case of 1968, which states that the philosophical convictions
falling under Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights do not
include the right to choose the language of instruction in schools. This principle has
also been used in the famous judgment of the Spanish Tribunal Constitutional 337/1994 of 23rd
December, which declares legitimate the Catalan educational system. (26)
7.
Conclusions
A doctrine which
is very critical of the Latvian linguistic and citizenship policies states that the
nationalist project aims to establish a nation-state based on the Latvian language and
culture in a territory which is at present highly multicultural, and multiculturalism is
rejected because it cannot guarantee supremacy fro the titular ethnic group. (27)
I only raise the doubt that the term
multicultural is misused in this framework: what the Latvians institution
clearly reject is a system based on the equality of the nationalities which live in its
territory. Latvians have the right to rebuild their democracy and their State, taking as a
basis their cultural national values, as language. The State is to a large extent of and for the
dominant cultural nation. (28) This implies that members of
the minority must be integrated in this State, but the State must also respect and promote
some minority rights. In Latvia there is no space for a State based on the political
equality of Latvians and Russians (speakers), but a certain degree of multiculturalism
must be admitted. It will be the task of the politics to determine how this double task
has to be fulfilled. (29) What is absolutely not
congruent with this double aim is to live out of the political decisions a large sector of
the residents of the country. That is why the policies of Latvia should aim to a better
integration of the Russian speaking people not only through education, but also allowing a
higher level participation in the decision making: and to assure that the citizenship must
be granted to all the legal residents in the Latvian republic.
Giovanni Poggeschi
European
Academy of Bolzano/Bozen
giovanni.poggeschi@eurac.edu |