Ukrainian supreme court: banishing the Hungarian language is constitutional

The supreme court of the north-eastern neighbour of Hungary found the law making Ukrainian the sole official language of the state constitutional. The Rada accepted the so-called ‘language law’ in 2019, which entered into effect this January.

Thanks to the law, from July 16, 2019, the name of airports, train and bus stations can only be written in Ukrainian, and the only language of administration is also the state language, index.hu reported in January. However, Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine, said in his presidential campaign that he would like to review the law. But nothing happened after he came to power.

Only Russian representatives of the Kyiv parliament attacked the legislation at the supreme court.

According to karpathir.com, this procedure has now ended with the supreme court saying that the law is constitutional. Taras Kremin, the state language protection commissioner of Ukraine, already hailed the decision.

• Dual citizens cannot hold offices in Ukraine – Hungarian minority negatively affected?

Minorities of Ukraine have been protesting against the language law since its first appearance as a bill. The Hungarian organisations say that the law was multiple steps back even compared to the language use situation in Ukraine in 2018, which the minorities criticised harshly already back then.

Today, it is

only allowed to use Hungarian in Ukraine in private conversations and religious services.

Those who do not use Ukrainian on trains, buses, schools, offices, etc. can be fined for it. 

Gergely Gulyás, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office, said on Wednesday that the Ukrainian government did not even accept the recommendations of the Venice Committee regarding the Hungarian language use in the country’s education system. Furthermore, the parliamentary group leader of the president’s Servant of the People Party said that nobody would back an initiative modifying the current language law in favour of the country’s minorities. Therefore,

such a bill would be killed in no time.

Dmitro Razumkov, the speaker of the parliament, said yesterday that they would modify the law following the recommendations of the Venice Committee.

Source: karpathir.com, index.hu