Assessing the agency of national minorities through court cases: mapping legal mobilization patterns in CEE

Project Information

MINORLEGMOB

Grant agreement ID: 842553

DOI

10.3030/842553

Project closed

EC signature date 20 March 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 31 October 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 165 085,44

EU contribution

€ 165 085,44

Coordinated by

Elliniko Idryma Evropaikis kai Exoterikis Politikis (HELLENIC FOUNDATION FOR EUROPEAN AND FOREIGN POLICY)
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MINORLEGMOB (Assessing the agency of national minorities through court cases: mapping legal mobilization patterns in CEE)

Reporting period: 2019-11-01 to 2021-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The research’s main objective was to investigate the situation of minority rights through the lens of litigation and legal mobilization in two new EU Member States, Romania and Hungary and an EU candidate country, Serbia, by focusing on four minority communities: the Roma minorities in Romania and Hungary, and the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Serbia. I addressed four major, closely inter-related research questions: Which rights these minorities have claimed through litigation and which they have not, and what could explain their activism in some cases as opposed to others? Which legal mobilization strategies have led to favourable court decisions, which have resulted in negative rulings and what are the main factors accounting for these outcomes? Why some rights given by law are not enforced in practice? Finally: what could be achieved through litigation concerning minority rights in terms of policy reform and social change? The project’s interdisciplinary approach, combining legal studies with political science, breaks new empirical ground by focusing on the agency of minorities through tracing legal mobilisation, moving forward the scholarly debate beyond the current emphasis on structural conditions.
This project has a very pronounced societal aspect as it reflects on problems minorities face in the region of Central-eastern and South-eastern Europe. Minorities must struggle against the tide of ethnic populism and illiberalism that serves national majorities, which is a particularly steep uphill battle compared to what now appears to have been the heyday of minority-rights protection that preceded the EU accession of the respective Central and Eastern European countries. Since their host states’ EU accession, minority representatives are increasingly turning to domestic courts, which have become the option of last resort for rights-claiming, as the opportunities for political mobilization by minority parties are narrowing with the increase in inequality in the power relations between minorities and majorities. The EU paid greater attention to minority rights as a form of political conditionality during the Eastern enlargement process, however since then it has failed to monitor how the now full members of the EU are treating their minorities. The research aims to draw attention to the relative social marginalization that characterizes most minorities in the region, which is in a stark contrast to the experience of most ethno-national minorities in the South-western and Western part of Europe.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

After doing some preliminary research and 30 fieldwork interviews, it clearly emerged what aspects of minority rights are the most important for minorities and which are the rights that have been most intensively litigated. Therefore, for the Roma minority in Hungary educational segregation, for the Roma in Romania access to housing while for Hungarians in Romania language and educational rights seemed to be the main subjects of interest. I published an article about the legal advocacy of language rights by the Hungarian minority in Romania, in the journal Nations and Nationalism (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12790) which is a case study about the multi-ethnic city of Târgu Mureș. While this article gave a snapshot about one locality, I am offering a more complete picture of the various legal mobilization activities of the Hungarian minority in Romania in the empirical chapter I drafted for the edited volume.
Concerning Roma rights, I focused on housing litigation by the Roma minority in Romania. Since a series of successful legal cases marked this litigation trend, it seemed worth looking at their enforcement and wider impact. In addition, in Romania there have been some local policy initiatives to provide housing for the most destitute Roma, which is exceptional in the region. Finally, from the beginning of the fellowship I was working on an edited volume co-authored with two legal scholars, Lilla Farkas and Zsolt Körtvélyesi, and ten contributors of individual chapters tracking legal mobilization by various minority communities in Central and South eastern Europe.
The articles and the book that emerge from this research clearly mark out the different legal strategies the various minority communities have been using. While the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia have mostly relied on quasi-legal procedures such as petitioning ministries, administrative bodies, the prefects, local governments and the anti-discrimination body, Roma rights organizations were much more active in litigation in court and also petitioning the equality body. The Turkish minority in Greece and the Roma minority in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary have built up a successful record of litigation at the European Court of Human Rights, with varying records of implementation. By contrast, minorities in Serbia, including Hungarians, Bosniaks and Albanians have mostly abstained from legal ways of rights claiming.
Besides the academic publications, the results of the research were publicized through conference presentations (ISA 2021 Annual Conference; ASN 25th Annual World Convention 2021; conference ‘Public interest litigation and migrant rights’, University of Verona, 30 November 2020; workshop ‘Legal Mobilization for Minority Rights’, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 5 November 2021 ), the workshop held at ELIAMEP in September 2021 (Workshop: “Legal Mobilisation for Minority Rights in Central and South-eastern Europe” : ΕΛΙΑΜΕΠ (eliamep.gr)) an opinion piece published on LSE EUROPP blog (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2021/11/24/romanias-hungarian-problem-a-minority-caught-between-integration-and-self-segregation/) and a policy paper to be published by ELIAMEP.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Besides mapping legal mobilization activities and strategies by these minorities, the main aim of this research has been looking at the utility of minority legal activism. In this respect, the present research clearly goes beyond the state of the art of the literature. There are hardly any works looking at legal mobilization of minorities in the three selected countries and also the wider region of Central-eastern and South-eastern Europe. Thus, my research makes an important empirical contribution in terms of highlighting minority legal mobilization strategies and analysing their impact. The edited volume offers the first systematic study of legal activism for minority rights and its political context in Central and South-eastern Europe. Such an analysis is also relevant in the context of the anti-pluralist and nativist Zeitgeist as the book explores the ways in which ethnic minorities use the law, particularly in response to democratic backsliding in the region. Scholars studying populism have so far have paid little attention to the impact of ethnic populism on national minorities who have traditionally been excluded “others” in Central- and South-eastern Europe. Finally, the articles and the book fill a gap in the nationalism and European enlargement literature concerned with the analysis of minority rights in CSEE. Although it has been recognized by scholars working in these genres that European integration shaped both political and legal opportunities for minorities in fundamental ways, examining legal activism beyond norm adoption in Central and South-eastern Europe has remained a real blind spot in this literature.

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