Interview with Fernand de Varennes

Can you tell us a little bit about your connection to the ECMI? How have you been involved in the ECMI activities?

My association with the ECMI goes back more years than I care to admit. I know it goes back to at least 1999, so more than two decades since I have a record of making a presentation in Tallinn on the rights of minorities in relation to citizen issues and in the area of political participation which was jointly organised by the European Centre for Minority Issues and the Legal Information Centre for Human Rights of Estonia in January of that year. I’m pretty sure I was even involved in early projects. So that means I might have started my connection with the ECMI a few years or even soon after its foundation in 1996 by the governments of Denmark, Germany and Schleswig-Holstein.

So from almost the very beginnings of the ECMI, I’ve had numerous involvement in three ways: first, in its publication and research activities as I must have contributed at least six or more papers on various themes such as on the implementation of the language rights of minorities, which was part of the Eastern Partnership Project. Secondly, I had the great privilege of being part of a number of training activities and similar seminars organized in different parts of Europe, something I felt was a much needed and very useful contribution then, and still is perhaps even more now when there is a rise in populist majoritarian nationalism. In any event I again over the years participated in quite a few such ECMI initiatives in places like the Baltic States and the Caucasus. Thirdly, I was finally more intimately associated in an advisory position with the direction of ECMI efforts for a period first as what was called Senior Non-Resident Research Associate, and also sat on an advisory board for a brief period of time. So quite a far-reaching connection. I hadn’t realized how long and significant it was.

Do you remember the first time you visited the ECMI Headquarters in Flensburg or an ECMI event? What was the occasion and how do you remember that day?

I really can’t be sure, but I think it might have been almost exactly 20 years ago, on 1 December 2001, when I participated in a conference on the implementation of minority rights and talked about how to use the European Court of Human Rights to address minority-related Issues’. It was an event organized in conjunction with the Federalist Union of European Nationalities. I do recall two things, however: first, that the weather in December was, well, let’s just say perhaps not the best. Secondly, how much I thought the work atmosphere and dedication of the people I met were far warmer and livelier than the weather… Actually, I remember one more thing: I had some great meals!

The ECMI opened its doors 25 years ago. In your opinion, how has the research on minority issues changed over the past 25 years?

What needs to be considered is not how research on minority issues has changed in the last 25 years, but how rather Europe has changed drastically around us in the last quarter of a century, and not necessarily for the better for minorities.

25 years ago, most would probably agree there was a particularly favourable context for acknowledging and addressing minority issues and their protection that was mainly but not exclusively linked to dramatic political upheavals in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s no coincidence obviously that this is the period that led to the adoption of instruments and treaties such as the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the creation of the mandate of the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities in 1992, and in 1993 the adoption of the Copenhagen membership for a country to join the European Union which included “stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities”.

Succeeding decades since then have not been generous to minorities. If I were to simplify and summarise how minority issues are being dealt in Europe – and globally – right now, I would go so far as to say that what we are dealing with currently is not stagnation, but regression. The Council of Europe’s FCNM and ECRML treaties and enforcement mechanisms are often simply being ignored by States, many of which appear to not consider them legally binding or enforceable. Minorities themselves are frustrated that so-called ‘rights’ or legal obligations can be so easily dismissed, and that the periodical review procedures can take years, even decades, to address what in some cases violations of their human rights. The cavalier way the Council of Europe commitments are being dealt with is contributing to a loss of faith in the goodwill or effectiveness of regional mechanisms that were supposed to protect minorities, their rights or their languages.

There is also in some countries a sense of growing hostility or at least intolerance of the culture, languages or religions of some minorities which is exemplified by the growing limitations to, and even fairly outright prohibition of, teaching in minority languages in public schools. There are even in a few European countries, East and West, limits to the extent private education can be conducted in (some) minority languages. This is a situation which was almost non-existent in the heady days of the 1990s.

At the European Union, we saw this year a deeply disturbing development. Despite the massive backing of over a million EU citizens, the support of the European Parliament expressed in a resolution with over 75% of the votes cast, as well as a great number of national and regional government endorsemenst, including the Bundestag of Germany, the Second Chamber of The Netherlands, the Parliament of Hungary, the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Brandenburg, the Landtag of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano-South Tyrol and the Frisian Parliament, the European Commission simply rejected out of hand the European petition campaign called the Minority Safepack European Citizens' Initiative which called for the adoption of a set of legal acts to improve the protection of persons belonging to national and linguistic minorities and strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity in the Union. It was, according to the Commission, simply not necessary, the Commission denying anything was needed since ‘the full implementation of legislation and policies already in place provides a powerful arsenal to support the Initiative's goals.’ All is perfect in the European Union, regardless of what more than one million citizens, the European Parliament, or different governments suggest. It’s actually worse than that, since in 2013, the European Commission actually tried to stop the petition collection from even beginning.  It took around 4 years for eventually the General Court of the European Court of Justice cancelled the Commission decision in February 2017.

We are also seeing in recent years a dramatic increase, what some called a tsunami, of hate speech in social media targeting minorities, and an increase in violent attacks and hate crimes against minorities in Europe, as well as an instrumentalizing of prejudices and scapegoating of minorities, of incitement to discrimination against minorities by populist politicians for their own short term electoral gains. Minorities are being demonized as never before since the end of the Second World War in ways that are real-world threats to justice and peace as never before. And this has also all contributed to a rise in instability in Europe and elsewhere.

The world has become a nastier, darker place. The OECD recently reported that more countries experienced violent conflict than at any time in nearly 30 years with the number of reported battle-related deaths increasing around ten times between 2005-2016. And most of these violent conflicts are intra-state, often involving a minority against the State with grievances of injustice, of not getting their ‘fair share’ or of feelings of not allowed to fully participate and benefit as full members of society. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ paradigm mixed in with feelings of injustice combined with perceived discrimination are reemerging even more strongly as potent factors of division rather than inclusion in European societies.

I could go on, but the key takeaway is that the ECMI’s research has today, perhaps more than ever, an extremely critical role to play as one of the few centres in the region focusing on in-depth research - and training - on minority issues to address these challenges and denialism threatening the region.

What do you think was the ECMI’s biggest contribution to the minority research so far?

To quote from well-known television and movie series, ‘To boldly go where no one has gone before’. With the Institute for Minority Rights in Bozen/Bolzano and the Tom Lantos Institute in Budapest, the ECMI is occupying a privileged and rarefied position for dedicated minority research, and especially on the rights and protection of minorities. It has most notably made invaluable contributions in areas such as political participation and inclusion, particularly in regions such as the Baltic States and the Caucasus .

In your opinion, what makes the ECMI unique and sets it apart from other research institutions dealing with minority issues?

What other research institutions? As I’ve said previously, it is already distinct in being part of only a very small handful of institutions which deal mainly with minority issues directly.

Thinking about the next 25 years, where do you see the role of the ECMI in minority research? What are the new developments and challenges for which the work of the ECMI might be useful?

Now more than ever, the ECMI and other research and training centres are absolutely essential to address the challenges Europe needs to face in the next 25 years. The rights of minorities seem to be increasingly threatened, that mechanisms which it was hoped in the 1990s would lead to justice and peace through the protection of minorities and their rights in Europe do not seem to being able to be respected or implemented, and there is a staggering rise of hate speech propelled by social media against minorities. and an increasing undermining of previously enjoyed rights by minorities, the ECMI should be looking at the next 25 years to revamp and re-energise efforts to raise awareness of the human rights of minorities, provide more widespread training as to what those rights require in practice in the real world in areas such as education in minority languages, rights to citizenship, and political representation and voting. It also could emerge as a leader on examining the successes but also gaps and failures of European regional mechanisms and institutions, which it has done already to a degree, such as the EU, the Council of Europe and the OSCE – and more critically had to fundamentally realign these for the future.  

Fernand de Varennes is Extraordinary Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria (South Africa), Adjunct Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (Ireland), and Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong (China). He was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues by the Human Rights Council and assumed his functions on 1 August 2017.