The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has adopted a decision with recommendations to Ukraine following the results of an urgent debate. This is reported by Yevropeyska Pravda.
82 deputies voted for the adoption of the amended document, 11 - against and 17 abstained from voting.
The PACE decision quite strongly condemns the fact that the Verkhovna Rada adopted the law on education by changing Article 7 (on the language of education) without consulting with representatives of national minorities. The Assembly also asked Ukraine to take into account each and all recommendations of the Venice Commission, as well as to make appropriate changes to the law on education. Meanwhile, the PACE (contrary to the position of the speaker, Estonian Andreas Herkel), stated that right now, before accepting the conclusion of the Venice Commission, there are "a number of legal issues to the law".
As a result of the debate, most of the proposals of Romanian and Hungarian deputies were accepted.
In particular, Hungarians and Romanians opposed the idea of "mixed education" with teaching 60% of subjects in Ukrainian and 40% - in the minority language. Also, all references to the fact that education "exclusively in the minority language" (without teaching part of the subjects in the state language) cause harm to the children themselves due to the reduction of their competitiveness in the labor market and the complication of entering higher education institutions have been removed from the document.
With a minimal advantage (39 votes "against" and 42 "for"), the Hungarian amendment was rejected, according to which references to the right of Ukraine to protect the state language, and also that the language unites by the state, should be deleted.
Also, with a minimal advantage (37 to 40 votes), it was possible to reject the proposal of parliamentarians from Romania and Hungary, who sought to exclude the mention of the absence of exclusively Ukrainian public schools (or with education exclusively in the languages of other minorities) in their states from the document.