Education Minister Vakarchuk finds himself between rock and hard place as Regions accuse him of infringing on minorities’ rights and Svoboda of kow-towing to minorities

July11200820:42

The Party of Regions intend to initiate the dismissal of Education Minister Ivan Vakarchuk, claiming his order #461 of May 26, 2008 “On the 2008-2011 program to improve the teaching of Ukrainian in secondary schools with schooling in the languages of national minorities” violates constitutional rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine, PoR press service said July 11.

Over 50 PoR lawmakers demand that the order be canceled. They called it a criminal attempt to forcefully change the language of schooling and replace it with Ukrainian as well as discriminate the teachers who use national minorities languages in teaching.

PoR claims the Vakarchuk order violates Article 10 of the constitution which guarantees free development of national minorities languages, the Russian language included,. Article 22 saying the rights of Ukrainian cannot be infringed by any new laws, the law on languages, the law on ethnic minorities in Ukraine as well as the European charter on regional languages and national minorities languages.

Comment by ZIK

July 9, Svoboda political board member and Lviv lawmaker Iryna Farion announced Svoboda will sue Education Minister Vakarchuk for violating Article 10 of the constitution by holding an independent testing of schoolchildren in 2008 in the languages of national minorities.

Jan. 24, 2008, Ivan Vakarchuk allowed the children schooled in the languages of national minorities to pass independent testing in their respective languages of schooling. In Western Ukraine, testing was done in Russian in Ternopil and Lviv. In Lviv, 82 children passed their testing in math in Russian, 22 in the Ukrainian history, 3 in world history, while in Ternopil math testing was run for 11 children in Russian, history of Ukraine for 7 children and world history, biology and geography for 4 school-leavers.

Iryna Farion refers to the laws of Ukraine on the higher education and on languages in Ukraine which stipulate that Ukrainian must be taught in all schools where schooling is done in other than Ukrainian languages. It boils down, Farion says, that every school-leaver must have an adequate level in the Ukrainian language.
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