European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
In the early 1990s, after the regime change, a number of factors in Europe contributed to the compilation of two international treaties on the protection of minorities within the framework of the Council of Europe. The reasons were manifold. Ethnic conflicts were taking place in the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the creation of a universal treaty on minority rights within the framework of the UN was doomed to fail, and an additional protocol on minority rights to the European Convention on Human Rights was impossible to adopt. In 1990 at the Copenhagen Meeting of OSCE (CSCE) a legal catalogue without binding force of minority law was drafted.
After these antecedents a first treaty to protect linguistic rights as part of the cultural heritage of minorities and thus to indirectly protect the linguistic rights of minority language users was adopted. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages was adopted in 1993. The languages protected are the languages traditionally present in the territory of the contracting states and concentrated in a specific area, i.e. regional and other minority languages. Protection is not extended to local varieties or dialects of certain minority languages nor does it cover the languages of immigrant communities.
The Charter provides for two levels of protection. The basic level protection applies to all regional or minority languages along the lines of the objectives and principles laid out. Such aims and principles include respect for the geographical limits of the minority language, the teaching and learning of the minority language at all levels and the promotion of its use in public and private life, verbally and in writing.
The higher level of protection now only covers the languages and territories of the contracting state’s choice. From the subjects listed in Part III of the Charter the contracting state must choose a total of at least thirty-five items. Possible subjects include media affairs, court proceedings, public administration and public services, economic and social life, among others. Hungary initially committed to a higher level of protection for Croatian, German, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian and Slovenian, and later for the Romani and Beás (Boyash) languages.