BILL ON MINORITY LANGUAGES IN THIRD READING

( Editorial: --> 0886 ) ZAGREB, Mar 19 (Hina)- After a long debate on the final draft of a bill on the official use of minority languages, the Croatian Parliament's House of Representatives decided to send the bill to its third reading. According to the bill, Croatian minorities could use their languages and scripts, along with the Croatian language and the Latin scripts at the first instance courts and administrative bodies and at representative and executive bodies of cities and municipalities. MPs of the Istrian Democratic Assembly and the Croatian Social Liberal Party believe that minorities should be allowed to use their languages at the county level as well. The caucus of MPs representing minorities believes that cities and municipalities where minorities languages are official should proclaim them equal to Croatian. Certain MPs stressed that minority rights should not be below those that they had in the former Yugoslavia. Thus, MP for the Primorje- Gorski Kotar county suggested that before the third reading the Government should draft a list of those rights. An ethnic Hungarian MP remarked that the bill's main fault was that it did not envisage official use of minority languages in municipalities where minorities have a relative majority. He noted that Croatia practically did not have any municipalities where minorities made absolute majority of the population. What an ethnic Serb MP finds amiss is that the bill restricts the use of minority languages to certain areas. (hina) jn mr/mrb 192019 MET mar 98