OSCE Mission, Language Commissioner launch joint campaign to promote language rights in Kosovo
Prishtinё/Priština, 12 September 2013 – The OSCE Mission in Kosovo and the Office of Language Commissioner launched today a public campaign to promote language rights in Kosovo.
The three-month long campaign titled “Your Language is Your Right” aims to raise public awareness of available language protection and complaints mechanisms and of the Language Commissioner`s role. Posters, leaflets and radio spots produced during the campaign in the Albanian, Romani, Serbian and Turkish languages will be distributed and aired across Kosovo.
“Setting up a legal and policy framework for the protection of language rights, including the establishment of the Office of Language Commissioner, the Communities Consultative Council working group on language, and the language policy network brought significant progress in Kosovo,” said Eduard Pesendorfer, Deputy Director of OSCE Mission’s Human Rights and Communities Department. “Now it is very important to ensure that the mechanisms are well understood and properly implemented.”
“I encourage all people in Kosovo to turn to the Office of the Language Commissioner if they feel their rights were violated and to use the Office as their advocate and guarantor of their language rights,” he added.
By the end of September, the OSCE and the Office of the Language Commissioner will organize five roundtable meetings for municipal and other officials to help them address challenges they face in during provision of services in official languages in Kosovo, and to identify solutions.
In 2012, the OSCE’s third edition of the Community Rights Assessment Report stated that Kosovo institutions often fail to fully comply with the language rights requirements, which negatively affects communities’ access to services. The full report is available at: //www.osce.org/kosovo/92244
The OSCE Mission in Kosovo is mandated with human rights protection and promotion, democratization, and public safety sector development. The OSCE helped reform the Office of the Language Commissioner in 2012 and continues to provide advice and train the Office’s staff.