Ádám and Others v. Romania
Ádám and Others (2020) is the most recent piece of the ECtHR’s jurisprudence related to minority educationwith regard to Hungarians. The case concerns the alleged discrimination in final high school exams of pupils belonging to national minorities studying in their mother tongue.The applicants were ethnic Hungarians who attended school in Hungarian in Romania, and failed to obtain their school-leaving qualification. They complained that they had less time than their Romanian peers to prepare for the exams, or simply to rest between them, because they also had had to sit, in the same time period, two additional exams, to test their knowledge of Hungarian language and literature. Moreover, the Romanian language and literature exams had been very difficult for them. They claimed that the content of the curriculum and the scheduling of the final exams had placed them at a disadvantage, since they had been treated in the same way as Romanian pupils, even though their situation had been different. While the importance to acquire the State languagehad not been called into question, the ECtHR stressed that the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention expressly recognised that the protection of minority languages should not be to the detriment of learning the official language of the State. Also, in the setting and planning of the curriculum, States have a certain margin of appreciation. The Court found that the manner in which the Romanian authorities had chosen to test students’ knowledge and the level of difficulty of the exam had not imposed an excessive burden on the applicants. In fact, their hardships were „the direct and inevitable consequence of [their] conscious and voluntary choice to study in a different language… [T]he law recognises a right but does not impose an obligation on pupils belonging to a national minority to study in their mother tongue”. Thus, the Court found no violation of the prohibition of discrimination(Art. 1 of Protocol No. 12 ECHR).