Ukrainian laws on ethnic minorities

There have been two main subjects in the first part of this article – freedom of speech and rights of ethnic minorities in modern Ukraine.

I would like to add some information about these rights.

In 2020 the Law on Indigenous Peoples was passed in Ukraine. Despite the UN definition of Indigenous Peoples (see the official UN website), the Ukrainian authorities have introduced an additional criterion for such Peoples; see below a quote from the Law on Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine on the official website of the Ukrainian Parliament.

Корінний народ України - автохтонна етнічна спільнота, яка... не має власного державного утворення за межами України. (Indigenous People of Ukraine is an autochthonous ethnic community that… does not have its own state entity outside of Ukraine.)

According to this law, ethnic Hungarians are not Indigenous People of Ukraine, although they came to Transcarpathia, which is now a part of Ukraine, in 896 at the latest.

On the other hand, Crimean Tatars, who came to the Crimea only in the 13th century, are Indigenous People of Ukraine according to this Law because they do not have their own state entity outside of Ukraine.

Such a system of division of national minorities in categories is unfair and discriminatory.

For example, each of the three largest peoples of Switzerland (Germans, French and Italians) have their respective state entities outside of Switzerland, but this does not limit their rights.

However, national minorities of Ukraine are currently divided into three groups - Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine have more rights; Non-indigenous Peoples, whose mother tongue is one of the official languages of the EU, have less rights than Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine but more rights than Non-Indigenous Peoples, whose mother tongue is not one of the official languages of the EU, i.e. more rights than e.g. ethnic Russians; see the Law on General Secondary Education in Ukraine on the official website of the Ukrainian Parliament.

I know only one another country, where national minorities were divided into three groups having different rights – it was Nazi Germany.

Ethnic Danes, who live in Northern Germany, were in Nazi Germany the so-called Reichsbürger and had more rights; ethnic Poles, who lived in Upper Silesia, were the so-called Staatsangehörige and had less rights than the Reichsbürger but more rights than e.g. Jews.