The Ukrainian presidency does not have any clear-cut legislation or concept concerning minority languages at the moment, Fedir Venislavsky, the presidential representative to the Constitutional Court hearing on the matter, said on Tuesday
KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th July, 2020) The Ukrainian presidency does not have any clear-cut legislation or concept concerning minority languages at the moment, Fedir Venislavsky, the presidential representative to the Constitutional Court hearing on the matter, said on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, the Constitutional Court began the hearings to determine the legitimacy of Ukraine's law designating Ukrainian as the country's only official language vis-a-vis the country's constitution, which contains provisions guaranteeing protection and free development of Russian and other minority languages.
"I cannot say that this issue has not been given any attention in the president's office, but I also cannot say that there is any holistic legislation or concept on the table," Venislavsky told a judge when asked if President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was going to propose to the parliament any draft regulation of the minority languages issue.
In May, Zelenskyy said that the language debate in Ukraine was "far-fetched," acknowledging that Ukrainian was not the first language for a sizable portion of Ukrainians. At the same time, he opined that all minorities have to speak Ukrainian.
This stance was echoed on Tuesday by lawmaker Halyna Yanchenko, the deputy head of Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party.
"I believe the language problem in Ukraine is artificial and ignited solely by pro-Russian political parties, which today try to challenge and annul the law which protects the Ukrainian language in the Constitutional Court," Yanchenko said on Facebook.
According to the lawmaker, the narrative that the minority languages � Russian, in particular � should have their rights protected in Ukraine is progressively being rendered obsolete.
"Ukrainian become increasingly popular year upon year. Give it some 10 years, and the 'Russian language' isssue will loose its topicality for our country altogether," Yanchenko said.
In 2012, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed a law allowing Ukraine's regions to speak their first language in Primary schools, courts and other state institutions. The law was applied mostly in Ukraine's southern and eastern regions, where predominant or significant parts of the population speak Russian as their first language.
Last May, Yanukovych's successor, Petro Poroshenko, signed another law making Ukrainian the only language to be used in education, the judiciary, health care and all other state services nationwide. The law has triggered public criticism for de facto segregating non-Ukrainian-speaking citizens into an outcast group with limited access to social services, on the one hand, and targeting the Russian language specifically, on the other, since English and other EU languages were given certain exemptions.
