Ethno-Cultural Diversity Resource Center (CRDE) launched on Tuesday, September 28, 2009, the report entitled “Monitoring the implementation of the European Regional and Minority Languages Chart”. The report analyzes how Romania implemented the provisions of the European Chart of Regional and Minority Languages regarding mass media. The Chart was adopted in 1992 in Strasbourg and was ratified by the Romanian Parliament by Law no.282/2007.
Conclusions of the Report
According to Report’s conclusions, Romania didn’t adopt other legal provisions except the existing ones. The engagements from the Chart were adopted in such manner that they could be included in the existing legislation.
The report shows that there are different benefits depending on the language. The languages spoken by many persons benefit of improvements as for example: the development of some statistic instruments, stationeries in some of the ministries; a special attention in implementing the guaranteed by law rights. In the case of small minorities, some of the community’s members don’t speak the mother tongue anymore, so that some of the rights guaranteed by the Chart are unused.
The report notices that the adoption of the Chart was not followed by a public information and promoting campaign, in order to make the communities’ members aware of their linguistic rights, and for the public institutions to be aware of the necessity of implementing the Chart’s provisions.
The second part of the Chart defines general principles of linguistic protection, which should be adopted by the country signing the Chart. The third part applicable to 10 languages, extents and details these rights. The Roma and Tatar communities asked for moving their languages from the second to the third part.
The Chart has general provisions and doesn’t specify the implementation methods – number of broadcast stations, broadcast duration, and content. For example, in the Hungarian minority’s case, representing 6,7% of the population, the broadcast duration for the Hungarian language is around 4% from the total broadcast duration. At the same time, the quality of the minorities’ languages media is poor.
Report’s recommendations
The report identifies some recommendations:
- Elaboration of some audience studies and researches regarding the needs of the minority languages speakers;
- Evaluating the quality of regional and minorities’ languages used in media (similar to the one made by the Audiovisual National Council regarding the Romanian language);
- Setting up a consultative body made of media experts – private and public media;
- Including the Internet as media instrument for the protection of minority and regional languages;
- Granting more FM radio licenses for local regional and minorities’ languages broadcast stations – in order to increase the access of those speaking the respective languages to broadcasts in mother tongue and for improving the quality and relevance of the media products;
- Encouraging the public broadcasting stations to broadcast in national minorities’ languages and archive online the broadcasts, in order to open the access to more categories of public at different hours;
- Setting up a special broadcast station for broadcasting in national minorities’ languages, including the news broadcasts and other important information for the native speakers of those languages; taking into account that this type of broadcasting is possible only through satellite, this broadcasting should be done the same as TVR 1, which is intercepted by almost the whole population; (DIVERS – www.divers.ro)