Four Years of the National Minority Councils - A Research Study Report

The Provincial Protector of citizens - Ombudsman has completed its third and final research study report on the implementation of the National Minority Councils Law and functioning of these councils since their foundation in 2010. This report is a unique compilation of three subsequent research reports comprising a legal analysis of the issues concerning the practical aspects of the implementation of this Law. It also contains feedback from the National Councils on the directions the amendments of the existing Law should take.

The third and final research incentive was twofold. Not only will the first mandate of the first ever National Councils to expire in October 2014, but the Law itself has been amended according to the ruling of the Serbian Constitutional Court stating that some of its provisions were not in line with the Constitution. The aim of the research was to do a retrospective analysis based on the data concerning the practical implementation of the Law during the National Councils' first mandate. More particularly, its objectives were to establish whether there had been any changes as compared to the data obtained in 2011, as well as to pinpoint the most prominent issues faced by the Councils implementing the Law.

The data were collected from 15 National councils: the Bulgarian, Bunjevac, Vlach, Egyptian, Hungarian, Macedonian, German, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Albanian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Greek and Czech.

The research conclusions indicate that the National Councils have been the most active in implementing their authorities in the field of education, official use of language and script and culture. The information field is the one with the least activities. There is a certain corpus of legal authorities used by all Councils, but there are some that none of them used. It is evident that the Councils were most active in implementing their authority right after the Law had been adopted by the Serbian Parliament, aka during the first two years from its coming into force.
The entire research study in Serbian is available here.