EU accession and the protection of minorities in Ukraine
| dc.contributor.author | ALBANESI, Enrico | |
| dc.contributor.author | BARABASH, Iurii | |
| dc.contributor.author | HERMANIN, Costanza | |
| dc.contributor.author | TKACHENKO, Yevhenii | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-06-23T15:22:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-06-23T15:22:39Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This reflection paper demonstrates the complexity for Ukraine in the present context of fulfilling the EU accession criteria on the protection of persons belonging to minorities. The paper does not aim to analyse or solve all the issues related to this challenge. Rather, it sets out some of the common ground – based on legal, sociological, and political considerations – found in the two aspects concerning minorities that have proved most controversial in recent political discussions and legal analysis. Since the beginning of the Russian aggression and the EU-Ukraine dialogue on enlargement, the status of the Russian language and that of the minorities with kin-states in Europe have proved to be contentious because one of the EU Member States with a kin minority in Ukraine, Hungary, has both close ties with Ukraine’s aggressor, and a veto power in the enlargement process. Issues related to the EU compliance framework on the rights of persons belonging to minorities are much wider for Ukraine, involving the protection of other national minorities, e.g. Roma, indigenous people, and the administrative, civil and criminal law relevant to groups defined by their race, religion, ethnicity or language. We leave these issues for further editions of the paper. Our conclusions on the subjects we concentrate on here point out that: a) according to international and European law, the rights of the Russian minority can be derogated until the end of the war, and the right to use Russian in public can be restricted until Russian is used by the Russian Federation as an instrument of geopolitical expansion; b) establishing special regions in Ukraine could contribute to destabilizing the whole country; c) the procedure to identify the territories where minorities are concentrated needs to be established by an Act of Parliament, and not a Government act, new data on the distribution of Ukraine’s population should be collected as soon as possible, ideally based on self-identification, and more granular data on educational and cultural resources, existing political representation and the role of advisory bodies should be made public; d) the process and criteria to appoint the Ombudsperson for Human Rights need to be made more transparent, even under martial law, and substantive and process elements of antidiscrimination and anti-hatred law completely transposed and better defined. | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1028-3625 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92857 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.orcid.putcode | 1814/81002:186513068 | |
| dc.publisher | European University Institute | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | EUI | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | RSC | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Working Paper | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 2025/22 | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Global Governance Programme | |
| dc.rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess | |
| dc.rights.license | Attribution 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | EU | |
| dc.subject | Ukraine | |
| dc.subject | Enlargement | |
| dc.subject | Minorities | |
| dc.subject | Accession | |
| dc.title | EU accession and the protection of minorities in Ukraine | |
| dc.type | Working Paper | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
| person.identifier.orcid | 0000-0001-8700-3746 | |
| person.identifier.other | 31521 | |
| relation.isAuthorOfPublication | dae2c9fc-72df-42e3-9e3a-3f7080c0dae3 | |
| relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery | dae2c9fc-72df-42e3-9e3a-3f7080c0dae3 |
