Kinga Gál (PPE-DE). – (HU) On 1 May it will be five years since we became members of the European Union, together with numerous other Central and Eastern European countries. It seemed then that each of the new Member States would observe the EU’s basic principles and the ban on discrimination, as well as protect and value linguistic diversity and the rights of national minorities.

Even after five years of EU membership, there may still be instances where the majority language is protected in an open, discriminatory manner to the detriment of the use of the indigenous national minorities’ languages. This is currently the case in Slovakia, where the language law passed in 1995 and subjected at the time to harsh international criticism has now been revived. This draft language law jeopardises the use of minority languages in every aspect of life, which also affects, for instance, the half a million-strong indigenous Hungarian minority who live there. Instead of promoting linguistic diversity and protecting the minority’s identity, it allows language monitors and inspectors to go into minority communities and impose heavy fines if they fail to comply with these regulations, which can only be described as madness from a Brussels perspective. This is why I call on the EU’s commissioner for linguistic diversity to intervene and put linguistic diversity into practice in Slovakia too.