BUDAPEST, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Hungary welcomed on Friday Ukraine’s move to submit draft legislation to parliament that strengthens the education rights of its ethnic Hungarian minority, and diplomats said it could help Kyiv to advance in its European Union membership talks.
Hungary has long complained about Ukraine’s treatment of its ethnic Hungarian minority, though Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s new government said in June it had reached an accord with Kyiv on the minority’s language, cultural and educational rights.
“The (Ukrainian) bill strengthens the legal guarantees of education in the Hungarian language, and the network of educational institutions,” Magyar said in a Facebook post.
Magyar has taken a less confrontational stance towards Kyiv than his predecessor Viktor Orban, but he too has said that progress on boosting the rights of some 100,000 ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine is a prerequisite for Budapest’s backing of Ukraine’s EU accession.
Two EU diplomats told Reuters on Friday that Kyiv and Budapest had agreed that if Ukraine’s parliament approves the legislation on education rights, Hungary would unblock its current opposition to opening talks in two areas of Ukraine’s membership bid – the internal market and competitiveness.
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Anita Orban — no relation of the former prime minister — said Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Vsevolod Chentsov had informed her that parliament would vote on the education rights bill this month.
“We welcome this step, which was preceded by bilateral Hungarian-Ukrainian expert-level talks in recent weeks and consultations with representatives of the Transcarpathian Hungarian community,” Orban wrote in a Facebook post.
In the EU accession process, candidate countries negotiate policy “chapters” which are grouped into six thematic clusters, including fundamental rights, the bloc’s internal market and external relations.
The EU opened negotiations with Ukraine on the first set of policy issues — such as the judiciary and functioning of democratic institutions — in June. The two sides opened negotiations on the external relations cluster in July.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves in Budapest and Lili Bayer in Brussels Editing by Gareth Jones)
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