Dear Mr Hansen,
As good friends of FUEN we follow its work and greatly appreciate its
decision made at the Moscow congress in the
interests of protecting the rights of the Hungarians in Romania. We
appreciate your support for the initiative of the Democratic Alliance of
Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) to launch a citizens’ initiative aimed at
adoption of general legislation on protection of minorities at the European
level. However, we regret to note that the European Union does not have the
legislative competence for such legislation to be adopted, yet the
elaboration of a legal act is the only thing one is allowed to request through
a citizens’ initiative.
It is well
known that attempts have been made for 40 years to have mandatory minority
protection legislation adopted in the Union,
but even today that is not possible without amending the EU treaties. The
Treaty of Lisbon did not bring any change in that sense. We ourselves
greatly sympathise with the efforts made by the members of the European
Parliament’s Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and
Languages and trust that their work will reap rewards sooner or later.
I wish to
inform you that the Szekler National Council intends to launch a citizens’
initiative which, if successful, would improve the situation of an appreciable
proportion of the minorities living in the Union.
We will request the framing of legislation that would guarantee the
conditions for economic, social and territorial cohesion in regions with
special national, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic characteristics
without those characteristics changing.
I wish to stress that our
proposal is not in conflict with the RMDSZ initiative, and should that
initiative take concrete shape and be registered by the Commission, we are
ready to support it and encourage our partners to do likewise.
Earlier we spoke with
Dr. Martha Stocker, deputy president of FUEN, Herbert Dorfmann, MEP, and
Günther Ratz, coordinator of the European
Academy of Bolzano, on this subject, and drew up our
proposal in the spirit of those talks.
More information about our
initiative can be found on the www.nationalregions.eu
website. Please find enclosed a detailed
description of the initiative. We would be grateful if you could study our
proposal, make your observations and lend your support to the initiative.
Yours
respectfully,
Balázs
Izsák
President
of the Szekler National Council
Marosvásárhely,
15 June 2012
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