Sunday, March 16, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
The paper focuses on the legal analysis of linguistic discrimination in the professional sphere in post-communist Europe. Latvia and Estonia are used as case-studies to demonstrate how far the misuse of apparently noble aims can go if national law and the judicial system fail to apply sufficient scrutiny to policies with noble stated goals. Based on the survey of all the relevant court practice in the two countries, the paper demonstrates that the systematic discrimination policy towards linguistic minorities institutionalised in the two countries in question breaches key requirements of at least three levels of the law: international, European, and also national law of Latvia and Estonia. It observes that, in particular, the doctrines of indirect discrimination and proportionality have been misapplied and misunderstood.
This analysis is placed within the conceptual framework of the move from the culture of authority to the culture of justification, which has happened in the EU, but has yet to occur in post-communist Europe.
