04 June 2004 22:12
Party set up to defend rights of 6m Russian speakers in EU
[Presenter, over video of meeting captioned Prague] Now for defending the rights of Russians at European level. The
Russian Party of the EU held its inaugural conference in Prague today. Representatives from Denmark, Norway, Cyprus, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states are setting up the first public political organization to defend the
interests of millions of inhabitants of the continent who consider their mother tongue to be Russian. Now that a number
of Eastern European and Baltic countries have joined the European Union, the Russophone minority is the EU's
biggest, with over 6m people. There are 2m in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia alone, and hundreds of thousands of those do
not have citizenship.
[Tatyana Zhdanok, captioned as participant at the Russian Party of the EU conference (Latvia)] In the first place,
there are problems relating to legal status, with the status of being resident in this or that country. There are many
people who do not have residence status but are effectively illegals. A temporary residence permit does not regulate the
issue of citizenship, to say nothing of the fact that in Latvia and Estonia there is a large group of so-called
non-citizens - this is a special legal status, effectively second-class citizens. An important objective is that all
these people should ideally have a single citizenship, a single European citizenship.
[Presenter] Another major objective of the Russian Party of the EU is to fight for the rights of Russian-speaking
inhabitants of Europe to receive education in their mother tongue. The new party plans to get its representatives in the
European Parliament.
[NTV Mir] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
