Minority SafePack, a signature drive campaign aiming to defend and extend minority rights in Europe, still needs more than 20,000 signatures to help improve the protection of persons belonging to national and linguistic minorities and strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity in the European Union.
One of the initiators of Minority Safepack was RMDSZ, a Hungarian party in Romania, but since then a number of organizations from all over Europe have joined. In Hungary, the Rákóczi Association is collecting the signatures.
In the European Union there are about 50 million people who belong to a national minority or a minority language community. EU has often left the minority issues to be dealt with on a Member State level, or by other international organisations, thus so far there wasn’t a comprehensive set of rules at a EU level.
The initiative therefore aims to encourage the European Union to improve the protection of people belonging to national and linguistic minorities and strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity in the Union. Hence, it is a package of law proposals for the safety of the national minorities.
As the SafePack is officially a European Citizens’ Initiative, if more than 1 million European support it, the European Commission must officially respond to the proposal.
A sufficient number of signatures were collected in eight EU Member States: Bulgaria, Denmark, Croatia, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Slovakia. However, it is not not enough to go through with the initiative, as one million valid signatures are needed after the exclusion of invalid signatures, which means that by the April 3 deadline, 10 per cent more, 1,100,000 signature should be presented to the European Commission.
The Hungarian government and a number of Hungarian parties like LMP, Jobbik, Momentum and Együtt also support the initiative. PM Viktor Orbán signed the initiative in a video message where he urged everyone to sign the campaign, arguing that the initiative is essential to defend the rights of Hungarians living in minority communities abroad.
Minority SafePack has so far collected more than 971,000 signatures, and the deadline to collect the final 21,000 signatures is 3 April 2018. You can sign it offline in post offices or online here.
via ec.europa.eu, minority-safepack.eu