NATIONAL MINORITIES IN ROMANIA: GOVERNMENTAL APPROACH
NATIONAL MINORITIES IN ROMANIA: GOVERNMENTAL APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that the conditionality of European Union membership had a decisive contribution at the standard setting on and institutional development of minority protection at national level in candidate countries. At the beginning of the 1990s, scholars identified several dangerous contextual problems that could have halted Romania's progress in becoming a consolidated democracy, one of them being the ethnic unrests. However, Romania succeeded in becoming member in main international and European organisations dealing, among others, with the protection of minorities. The paper critically assesses the viability of the state apparatus created in Romania in order to safeguard and improve the rights of minorities inhabiting its territory in the context of the European Union integration. The question of whether the institutional framework for minority protection in Romania succeeded in achieving its stated goal: satisfy the Copenhagen criterion of “stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and, protection of minorities” is to be discussed within the paper. Furthermore, the paper assesses the extent to which the accession process has generated a substantial change in the institutional framework in Romania. The paper concludes that in order to produce qualitative results, attention must be paid not only on the formal compliance with legal standards but also on the apparatus created to promote and apply those standards.

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