BRATISLAVA, March 28, (WEBNOVINY) – Three draft proposals from the non-parliamentary SMK, which represents the interests of Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarians, will likely be incorporated into the new Hungarian constitution, currently under preparation. The party led by Jozsef Berenyi came up with the suggestion to include a notion in the preamble of the new constitution of the Hungarian Republic that minorities are the country’s state-forming communities. The current constitution does not include any such notion. The SMK also wanted protection of use of minority languages to be stronger than in the current constitution and representation of minorities in Hungarian Parliament to be guaranteed in the constitution.
“As far as we know, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is to announce the outcome of negotiations thus far in parliament today, and all three issues should be taken into consideration,” informed Berenyi after he met with head of the Slovak self-administration in Hungary Jan Fuzik.
In the first version of the new constitution, minorities played no role, reported Fuzik. However, following protests and interventions by representatives of the association of nationwide minority self-governments, minorities eventually made it to the draft constitution. “The original proposal said only that the Hungarian Republic honors the languages of its minorities, but we need to ensure conditions for preservation and development of languages of minorities, including Slovak, and we also need a more specific formulation to guarantee parliamentary representation, which was included in the new version,” said Fuzik. He said that during talks they also drew attention to further minority rights, which are codified in the current constitution and were dropped during formulation of the new document.
Fuzik finds it important to back the existence of an independent parliamentary ombudsman for the rights of national and ethnic minorities. The current constitution draft counts on one general ombudsman instead of the current four independent specialized ombudsmen. Representatives of minority self-administrations, however, argued that the loss of an independent national ombudsman would mean cancellation of another important pillar of the minority law from 1993, said Fuzik. Since then, minorities have lost some important achievements anchored in the law, including an independent office for national and ethnic minorities and a public foundation for national and ethnic minorities. Now the threat of the loss of an independent ombudsman is hovering over minorities, specified Fuzik.
SITA