Incidència del Conveni-marc per la protecció de les minories nacionals en l'Estatut de les llengües regionals o minoritàries

Resum

In order to attain a democratic and stable Europe, it is necessary to solve the situation of the minorities, regardless of whether or not they are linked to a minority language. The European Chart of regional and minority languages, an international agreement of the European Council passed in 1992, aims at ensuring European plurilingualism, protecting historical languages as an essential element of culture. The Framework Convention on the protection of national minorities, passed in 1994 and open to non-member states, aims at protecting such minorities, as well as linguistic minorities, through principles -without specific measures- that the states need to apply in their legislations. These two documents are the first mandatory legal tools in international law on this subject. Neither of them, however, acknowledges minority rights, in spite of the insistence on this point on the part of the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Council. Following an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Europe and a presentation of the previous international legal framework regarding minorities, mention is made of the goals and strategies of the abovementioned documents, whereupon their obligations and common principles, and the complementary ones of the Framework Convention as regards the Chart, as well as their control mechanisms -with a very weak guarantee system of execution-, are specified. In spite of the positive aspects of the Framework Convention on the protection of national minorities, the fact that it does not guarantee any rights, especially language rights, shows that it is not a serious enough answer to the problem presented by the ethnolinguistic map of Europe.