HELSINKI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2021) The closure of the only Russian school in the northern Estonian city of Keila by local authorities has been appealed with the Baltic country's Supreme Court, the Tallinn-based Russian School of Estonia non-profit said on Monday.
On February 12, the Tallinn District Court declined the complaint filed by parents, upholding the decision of the Keila city council to abolish the Russian school.
"An appeal against the Tallinn District Court's ruling to approve the closure of the Russian school in Keyla has been submitted to the Supreme Court", the organization said.
Mstislav Rusakov, the non-profit's chairman and the lead attorney in the school case, said that if the appeal ends up declined by the Supreme Court, which is Estonia's highest instance court, the appellants will take it to the European Court of Human Rights.
In 2019, Keila's city council voted to merge the Russian school with a local Estonian school into a single state gymnasium with lessons only in Estonian. Human rights defenders have raised the alarm about former students of the Russian school, whose mother tongue is Russian, not being admitted to the Estonian schools because of insufficient fluency in Estonian, which they say amounts to the deprivation of the right to education.
