MINORLEGMOB · Assessing the agency of national minorities through court cases: mapping legal mobilization patterns in CEE

Assessing the agency of national minorities through court cases: mapping legal mobilization patterns in CEE

The research’s main objective was to investigate the situation of minority rights through the lens of litigation and legal mobilization in two new EU Member States, Romania and Hungary and an EU candidate country, Serbia, by focusing on four minority communities: the Roma minorities in Romania and Hungary, and the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Serbia. I addressed four major, closely inter-related research questions: Which rights these minorities have claimed through litigation and which they have not, and what could explain their activism in some cases as opposed to others? Which legal mobilization strategies have led to favourable court decisions, which have resulted in negative rulings and what are the main factors accounting for these outcomes? Why some rights given by law are not enforced in practice? Finally: what could be achieved through litigation concerning minority rights in terms of policy reform and social change? The project’s interdisciplinary approach, combining legal studies with political science, breaks new empirical ground by focusing on the agency of minorities through tracing legal mobilisation, moving forward the scholarly debate beyond the current emphasis on structural conditions. This project has a very pronounced societal aspect as it reflects on problems minorities face in the region of Central-eastern and South-eastern Europe. Minorities must struggle against the tide of ethnic populism and illiberalism that serves national majorities, which is a particularly steep uphill battle compared to what now appears to have been the heyday of minority-rights protection that preceded the EU accession of the respective Central and Eastern European countries. Since their host states’ EU accession, minority representatives are increasingly turning to domestic courts, which have become the option of last resort for rights-claiming, as the opportunities for political mobilization by minority parties are narrowing with the increase in inequality in the power relations between minorities and majorities. The EU paid greater attention to minority rights as a form of political conditionality during the Eastern enlargement process, however since then it has failed to monitor how the now full members of the EU are treating their minorities. The research aims to draw attention to the relative social marginalization that characterizes most minorities in the region, which is in a stark contrast to the experience of most ethno-national minorities in the South-western and Western part of Europe.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union