Russian MFA Spokesman Andrei Nesterenko Response to Media Query Regarding the Latest Report of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance

Question: How does the Russian MFA assess the report of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance released on March 3 in Strasbourg and calling on Estonia's authorities to reconsider their attitude to the Russian-speaking population of the country?

Answer: Once again, now in the Fourth Monitoring Cycle on Estonia, a specialized Council of Europe body, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), has released a report on the situation in Estonia. The current report, like previous ones, is very critical and notes that there remain in that country virtually all the problems earlier indicated by ECRI with regard to the status of the so called "noncitizens" and Russian speakers as a whole. Thus, the number of persons without citizenship is still very high (over 100,000), the pace of naturalization is slow, the Estonian language proficiency requirements are too high, the powers of the linguistic inspections, whose activities exacerbate the already-high unemployment rate among the Russian-speaking population who suffer from discrimination in employment, are essentially unlimited, and so on. The report notes that the recommendations of the ECRI are not being implemented properly, and the steps being taken are insufficiently effective.

The ECRI report once again confirms the correctness and validity of Russia's concerns over the abnormal humanitarian situation in Estonia. We always emphasize that Russia does not raise any farfetched or inflated claims against the Estonian authorities. All that we are trying to get from Tallinn, is contained in the above ECRI report and similar documents of other international organizations.

However, the Estonian authorities time and again show their true attitude towards the appeals and recommendations of authoritative international organizations to eliminate the unprecedented for modern Europe problem of mass noncitizenship in Estonia and to give national minorities the basic political and socioeconomic rights.

With this approach, we can assume that the ECRI recommendation for an early amendment to the legislation on rights of minorities, the local authorities, tirelessly claiming that the "nontitular population has no problems" will ignore it in their characteristic manner and try to maximally delay adoption of necessary acts, especially as it is about such sensitive issues for the country.

It is surprising that the European Union has done nothing in this situation. By all appearances, the EU finds Tallinn's sole unsubstantiated references to its own opinion that Estonia has fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership sufficient. But actually the Estonian authorities with the silent acquiescence of the EU continue their discriminatory policy against the Russian-speaking minority of the country.

March 4, 2010