Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai met Knut Vollebaek, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, to discuss Slovakia’s amended state language law on Wednesday.
Vollebaek arrived in Budapest on Tuesday for talks after meetings on the contested law in Bratislava the previous day.
Bajnai welcomed Vollebaek’s confirmation that he would continue to be actively involved in further rounds of talks on the implementation of the law that regulates the use of minority languages in neighbouring Slovakia.
The OSCE High Commissioner has a key role in getting the two sides to return to the process they committed themselves to under the agreement their prime ministers had reached in Szecseny, north Hungary, last September, said Bajnai. Slovakia has unilaterally departed from that commitment, he said.
Bajnai said he trusted that as a result of the latest round of Vollebaek’s talks in Bratislava, the delicate balance between the Slovak state language and ensuring the use of minority languages would be restored.
The prime minister said that minority rights and the use of mother tongue “should not fall hostage to domestic political clashes” in Slovakia.
Bajnai said the Hungarian government continued to reject any restriction of use of mother tongue or any related penalties.
“The current discrimination against minorities in Slovakia cannot be eliminated without removing the punitive clauses from the state language law,” he said.
Bajnai argued that the main division over the law is not between Hungary and Slovakia but between the Slovak state and its citizens, and between the law and various international norms.
Meanwhile, Zsolt Nemeth, the Fidesz politician who heads parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told a news conference after meeting Vollebaek on Wednesday that the only reassuring solution would be for Bratislava to withdraw the language law in its entirety.
