ABSTRACT
In the context of enlargement to the East, the European Council set out its criteria for membership of the European Union at the Copenhagen Summit in 1993. One of the criteria was that ‘the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities’. It is in regard of this last criterion that a number of concerns have been raised on the applications for EU membership from the Eastern European States. Rules regarding economic liberalisation and rule-of-law reforms, have by way of contrast, been successfully emulated in the CEECs political/institutional system as they were considered beneficial to the emerging business community.1 The question of whether the applicant countries (now new Member States) provided for strong institutional resources that were committed to the promotion of minority rights was not addressed by the Commission during the enlargement process, hence, other international monitoring mechanisms had to be relied on (in particular the relevant CoE institutions such as the Ad Hoc Committee for the Protection of National Minorities (CAHMIN)), in order to assess the actual minority situation in the Member States, as there is no EU post-accession monitoring by the EU. The level of minority protection varies in every country as different factors such
as the ethnic make-up of the country, territorial changes or historical/political aspects have to be taken into account. However, the Roma minority, which is the biggest and most marginalised minority in all Member States, old and new, has not profited much from the enlargement process. Despite the introduction of antidiscrimination legislation and a number of EU-sponsored policy initiatives (see, in particular, the EU’s Network of Independent Experts proposal for a Roma Integration Directive),2 only few real changes in the situation of the Roma throughout the EU can be accounted for. Also the Russian minority in Estonia and Latvia remains excluded from certain privileges due to their lack of citizenship which deprives them of a number of human rights.3
