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Ukraine is ready to amend its laws on minority rights in order to unlock the EU’s agreement to open accession talks later this year, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said.
Olga Stefanishyna, who is responsible for Ukraine’s EU accession process, told the Financial Times that Kyiv is prepared to make “additional changes” to secondary education rules for minority languages such as Hungarian, as long as they are consistent with Ukrainian Just strike a balance in teaching. Ukraine.
This issue has become the biggest potential obstacle to launching formal EU accession negotiations with Kyiv. EU leaders will decide in December whether to start talks, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly threatened to veto the process on minority rights and accused Kyiv of “Hungarianphobia.”
Ukraine has dozens of ethnic minorities – there are an estimated 80,000 Hungarians in the western Ukrainian province of Zakarpattia – and protecting their rights is one of seven reform benchmarks required by the EU before opening accession talks.
Ukrainian officials will begin bilateral talks with Hungary and Romania this week to try to reach an agreement on the balance of Ukrainian and minority language education in secondary schools.
“We will amend the legislation on minorities and if necessary we can make additional amendments (to be incorporated into the law), but we need to have (bilateral) negotiations first,” Stefanisina said.
However, the deputy prime minister said Ukrainian minorities need to learn enough Ukrainian to enable them to pursue further education or employment opportunities outside minority areas. She said current rules introducing more compulsory Ukrainian language teaching were working well: “A balance has been found and it is working. So we do need to evaluate this.”
Officials in Kyiv and Brussels fear that Orban, a Moscow ally, has no intention of finding a solution to the education issue and will use it as an excuse to block EU accession talks starting in December.
The Venice Commission, a constitutional advisory body affiliated with the Council of Europe, also said that Ukraine should protect the language rights of Russian speakers. Stefanisina has previously expressed confidence that the EU will not delay the launch of negotiations on this issue.
The European Commission said Ukraine had fully met two of the seven benchmarks for starting negotiations – media freedom and judicial reform. It will assess progress on five other fronts later this autumn – minority rights, anti-corruption reforms, anti-money laundering rules, anti-oligarchy laws and Constitutional Court reform.
On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked parliament to reintroduce a public mandatory asset register covering some 300,000 officials. The register, created in 2016, is seen by anti-corruption groups and the International Monetary Fund as an important safeguard against the illegal acquisition of wealth. The project was suspended on security grounds last year following a full-scale Russian invasion.
Civil society groups have asked Parliament to reinstate mandatory declarations, except for those in service.
Earlier this month, MPs acquiesced to the approach but voted to keep the register secret for a year, sparking a firestorm of criticism. A petition calling for a public registration gained tens of thousands of signatures in a matter of hours.
Zelensky vetoed the law on Tuesday and urged parliament to quickly pass a revised version.
“The statement must be fully disclosed. Now,” he said on Telegram.
Before Zelensky’s action, Stefanyshina told the Financial Times that an immediate return to public asset declarations would “leave no room for speculation or for undermining our commitment to fighting corruption.”
This story has been updated to include Zelensky vetoes asset declaration law
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