Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities and Ukrainian Culture Ministry organize conference on diversity in Ukraine

The office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) and the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine organized a conference on “Integration with respect to diversity: legal standards and good practices from across the OSCE region” on 13 June 2017 in Odessa.

Participants discussed two interrelated questions: how can Ukraine’s diversity be effectively managed to minimize divisions and how can diversity be harnessed to make Ukraine’s society more resilient?

Rainer Hofmann, Professor of Constitutional Law, Public International Law and European Law at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, outlined the international standards for the protection and promotion of the rights of persons belonging to national minorities and their application across Europe. Hofmann explained that while substantive standards are well developed in Europe, enforcement has proved challenging at times.

The participants discussed Ukraine’s implementation challenges and the opportunities presented by the standards that it has adopted, especially those related to participation, language, education and media.

Jennifer Croft, HCNM Senior Advisor, presented The Ljubljana Guidelines on Integration of Diverse Societies, which synthesize the HCNM’s accumulated experience and provide policymakers with guiding principles and practical advice on how to elaborate and implement policies that facilitate the integration of diverse societies.

Lesia Kornat of the Lviv Regional State Administration said the information shared by the international experts would be very useful to local experts in their daily duties related to minority rights. “The fact that we are focusing on inter-ethnic relations here today signals the importance of this issue,” she said.

The conference brought together 20 representatives from regional administrations; from the Ministries of Culture, Justice, Education and Science, and Social Policy; from Odessa regional State Migration Service and the State Committee on TV and Radio Broadcasting; as well as representatives of religious communities.

This event followed a conference organized by the same partners in Kyiv in October 2016, which focused on the institutional framework for inter-ethnic and national minority issues in Ukraine.

Ukraine is currently implementing comprehensive reforms in multiple sectors that are relevant to the rights of persons belonging to national minorities.