Genesis of law on national minorities in Ukraine

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the genesis of law on national minorities in Ukraine. The authors argue that the minorities’ diversity demands the comprehensive and balanced legislation for the effective regulation of the rights of above mentioned groups with a primatus of national security, peace and state sovereignty.
It is explained that due to the Law on National minorities (1992) Ukraine succeeded in its efforts to avoid serious internal conflict between the national minority groups themselves. The state avoided a problem which appeared in the most of the other post-soviet states. And that was an achievement in which the Ukrainian government and people may feel a certain degree of pride
The period of the 1990s-2000s is characterized by the consolidation of the basic rights of national minorities at the constitutional level. However, the Law on National Minorities did not undergone any changes, while significant dynamic was an immanent feature of changes in other areas of Ukrainian legislation.
The Law of Ukraine «On the Principles of State Language Policy» (2012) contradicted the Constitution. First, it gave local councils the right to recognize the regional languages, while the use of languages is a matter of nationwide importance and not of local importance, and is determined exclusively by laws. Secondly, the Law was discriminatory in relation to the languages of that national minorities, which were not included in the list of 18 languages that can claim the status of regional or national minority languages.
The adoption of the new Law on National Minorities (2022) was caused by: 1) the change in the political vector of Ukraine (2014) and a reorientation exclusively on the values of a democratic society; 2) the change in the approaches to the protection of national minorities issue at the international level: from the simple inadmissibility of discrimination, the ban on the use of language and other assimilation policies, to the positive obligations of the state aimed at supporting the cultures of ethnic communities.
Certain limitations, or rather inconsistencies of the Law with international standards for the national minorities protection, derive from: 1) the need to ensure national security, especially in the context of the current Russian-Ukrainian War; 2) the risk for Ukrainian language to lose its dominant status in Ukraine; 3) the desire of the Ukrainian government to preserve some slack for «bargaining» in the process of further rapprochement with the European Union.