Addressing the meeting, Foreign Minister Gordan Jandrokovic said that Croatia had assumed high standards in the protection of minorities and that following the principle of reciprocity, it had the right to request other countries to apply the same standards in protecting local Croats.
The minister announced a new government strategy on relations with Croats living outside Croatia, adding that care for them was Croatia's moral and constitutional obligation and that the country would not change this policy after its entry into the European Union.
Representatives of the Croat communities in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, Slovenia and Montenegro notified the committee about problems those communities encountered in the said countries.
Slaven Bacic said that since the early 1990s when Slobodan Milosevic came to power, some 35,000 Croats had left Vojvodina.
He said he expected Croatia to call on the Croats in Vojvodina to identify themselves as Croats during the forthcoming census in Serbia.
Miroslav Franovic said that some 7,000 people in Montenegro identified themselves as Croats, and that a few more thousand people of Croat descent declared themselves as "Catholics or as inhabitants of Boka Bay" or did not want to be ethnically described in any way out of fear.
Petar Antunovic said that there were some 40,000 Croats in Slovenia, including 11,000 in the capital of Ljubljana. He said that they did not have such problems as ethnic Croats in Montenegro or Serbia but that they had problems in being granted cultural autonomy.