On February 1st, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted its third resolution on the implementation by Finland of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. The stalemate in the negotiations between the government and the Sami parliament on the issue of land rights in the Sami Homeland and the situation of the Sami languages were two out of three issues that the Committee of Ministers lifted as in need of immediate action. Improving existing consultation of persons belonging to national minorities in order to ensure that national minorities, including those of numerically smaller minorities, can have a real impact on the decision-making process was the third issue.The Committee of Ministers also recommended measures to ensure that Swedish speakers are provided with access to public services in their language, in conformity with the legal provisions in force, and pay due attention to linguistic rights at all stages of the ongoing administrative reform process and to ensure that the Finnish education system provides sufficient Swedish language learning opportunities in order to maintain and increase the number of civil servants with Swedish language skills.
The resolution can be found on the home page of the Council of Europe, please find a direct link to the text here.
The Åland Islands Peace Institute works directly with issues of national and linguistic minorities. Among others in 2010 a report on minority education in Finland (in Swedish, with a short English summary) written by Dr Kristian Myntti ‘Minoritetsutbildning i Finland’ was published. It can be downloaded here.
Currently the Åland Islands Peace Institute participates in research concerning the position and development of minority languages and of language diversity in Europe within the research project ELDIA (European Diversity for All), within the EU 7th programme for research. Several reports have been published within the electronic publication series Working Papers in European Language Diversity More information on the projekt can be found here.
