Overview
- On Friday, Ukraine formally submitted a draft law to parliament that aims to strengthen education rights for the country’s ethnic Hungarian minority.
- The text would allow schools where more than 50% of pupils study in a minority language to gain special status and would require heads or deputies of those schools to be proficient in that language.
- Hungary’s government publicly welcomed the move and said the law is a key condition for it to lift its blockage of parts of Ukraine’s EU accession process.
- EU officials say passage could help open additional enlargement clusters at upcoming ministerial talks, but other member states may still raise separate economic or sectoral objections.
- Roughly 80,000–100,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Zakarpattia, local Hungarian organisations have urged quick adoption, and the draft limits protections to minority languages that are official EU languages to avoid enabling Russian-language promotion.