The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: its origins, structure, and process

The aim of this article it to explain how the European Charter came about and how it works both as a structure and as a process, describing its most important features. It is a Council of Europe treaty concluded in 1992 and in force since 1998, and it is dedicated specifically to the protection and promotion of regional or minority languages as the cultural heritage of Europe, making it remarkable in the world. The Charter is based on the so-called menu system meaning that in addition to common “objectives and principles”, individual states parties have different sets of undertakings. They can choose various undertakings for different regional or minority languages spoken on their territory depending on the size and needs of the languages. The first two sections of the article deal with the origins of the Charter and its structure as a convention. Sections 3 and 4 discuss the issue of state parties to the convention and differences in ratification. Section 5 explains the Charter’s process, i.e., how progress in implementing the obligations is monitored as well as the recent reform that was introduced to make monitoring more transparent. The last two sections summarize the Charter’s impact on the protection and promotion of RMLs as well as the main challenges facing this convention in the future