Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has seriously questioned the implementation of the new law on national minorities in Ukraine.
Péter Szijjártó has said that he questions the implementation of the new law adopted in Ukraine on national minorities. According to the Hungarian diplomat, the Eastern European country has been systematically discriminating against the rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians since 2015.
“The fact that the Ukrainian parliament has passed some law, I do not attach much importance to it, because how it will be implemented there and whether it will be,” the Hungarian foreign minister emphasised in an interview with the Mandiner portal.
The Hungarian Foreign Minister also commented on the presenter’s statement that the law is “promising”. The Hungarian diplomat responded as follows: “I wouldn’t say that.” The foreign minister emphasised that the rights of national minorities, especially Hungarians in the Transcarpathian region, are steadily violated in Ukraine.
“I don’t know how many foreign ministers of Ukraine I have worked together with, but with all of them I have negotiated about this, please give back the rights. For eight years the rights have only been taken away. Eight years. Now there is a parliamentary decision, and one should actually think that in four days one can put eight years out of brackets?”, the diplomat said.
The Hungarian foreign policy chief said that the law on national minorities, which was recently adopted in Ukraine, “is very far from the situation in 2015”.
“And I will say again. Maybe these are the words of Brussels, we hear it all the time: implementation, implementation, implementation. How can we say about a law passed four days ago that they are implementing it, if for eight years it was about anything but correctness,” Szijjarto summarised.
We shall remind you that earlier Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban mentioned that Budapest did not pin much hope on the “new” Ukrainian draft law on the issue of national minorities.