Addressing a two-day minority rights conference on Thursday, the foreign ministry’s senior official Zsolt Nemeth said Hungary was committed to ensuring that human and minority rights should prevail as widely as possible.
“Hungary is committed to ensuring that these rights are not only practised in Hungary and the countries surrounding it but in a wider area, too,” the state secretary in charge of EU and international development affairs told participants, adding that the policy of promoting cultural diversity had been a priority under the country’s EU presidency.
Nemeth said attention should focus on the most vulnerable minorities. Arguing that minority rights belonged to broader concepts of basic human rights, he said members of minorities should be afforded access to education, food and water as well as the right to practise the language and culture of their own peoples.
Nemeth told the conference organised by Minority Rights Group (MRG) that the members of minorities should undertake to be active participants in their own sustainable development. Besides economic issues contained in development plans, consideration should also be given to their own ways of life and cultural heritage.
British Ambassador Greg Dorey said that from the perspective of Budapest the problems of poor countries may appear distant, but faraway epidemics, famine and human- and drug-smuggling had an impact on the EU.
“Only together, with close cooperation, can we overcome these problems,” he said.
