LUXEMBOURG (CN) — The European Union’s highest court on Thursday rejected a bid from Romania to block a citizen’s initiative aimed at protecting national and linguistic minorities and their cultural heritage.
The European Court of Justice dismissed Bucharest’s appeal, finding that the Minority SafePack initiative - which includes calls for expanding minority language media and funding research into linguistics - fell within the EU’s purview. The ruling was not immediately available in English.
Under the European Citizens’ Initiative, citizens can propose legislation of interest provided they collect at least 1 million signatures from a quarter of the EU’s 27 member states. Backed by the Federal Union of European Nationalities, a lobbying group that represents minority European cultures and languages, Minority SafePack supporters collected 1.1 million signatures in April 2018.
Minority SafePack was first proposed in 2013, but the European Commission refused to register it, claiming the proposals were beyond its authority. Organizers sued the EU’s executive branch and the bloc's second-highest court, the European General Court, found the commission hadn’t offered concrete enough reasons for rejecting the initiative. In 2017, the commission finally accepted it.
Romania then filed a complaint with the Luxembourg-based court to block the initiative, arguing again that the commission didn’t have the authority to submit the proposals in it for consideration by the European Parliament. The initiative got a whopping 255,000 signatures in the country of 19 million, mostly from Hungarian-speaking people in Transylvania and the Romani community, a nomadic ethnic group that has long faced persecution.
The lower court rejected Romania’s arguments in 2019 and the country appealed on largely procedural grounds, claiming that the General Court hadn’t allowed both sides to properly debate the merits of the case.
The Court of Justice’s Fourth Chamber was unmoved by Romania’s arguments.
“The parties were able to argue against each other during the written and oral phases of the procedure,” the three-judge panel wrote in Thursday's ruling.
“It is important and encouraging for others that the [court] has consistently given us justice for the rights of minorities and the promotion of cultural and linguistic diversity,” Federal Union of European Nationalities President Vincze Loránt said in a statement.
In 2020, the Minority Safepack organizers sent a request to the European Commission asking for it to consider their nine demands. Two-thirds of the European Parliament voted in favor of the resolution, the first European Citizens’ Initiative to get the backing of the parliament. However, in January 2021, the commission again declined to move forward, claiming the proposals were mostly included in other legislation that was already being considered.
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