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Smoke and Mirrors: Roma and Minority Policy in Hungary

Hungary prides itself not merely on having effective minority policy, but having actually broken new ground in the field of minority rights of being, among European states, the minority avant-garde. The centerpiece of the edifice about which Hungarian government officials ritually brag in international fora is Act LXXVII of 1993, the so-called "Minorities Act". The Minorities Act establishes 13 minorities in Hungary Armenians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Germans, Greeks, Poles, Romanians, Ruthenes, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Ukrainians and "Gypsies". The Minorities Act secures rights to the use of minority languages, educational activity, "cultural autonomy" and the right to maintain links with "the state and communal institutions of the 'mother' country or language group." In institutional terms, the Act has given rise to "local minority self-governments" and "national minority self-governments", advisory bodies to local government and the national government respectively, of which, as of June 30,2000, there were over 1300. This paper will argue that while the 1993 Act has been somewhat beneficial especially in the field of highlighting the existence of certain minorities in Hungary and thereby promoting, to a very limited extent, multiculturalism the Act has at the same time reified the exclusion of non-white minorities in Hungary, most notably the now numerically significant groups of various Arab, African, Turkish, Chinese and Vietnamese peoples in Hungary. Additionally and more centrally for the purpose of this paper the Minorities Act has set up an institutional framework largely inappropriate for addressing the situation of Roma ("Gypsies"), who face basic human rights issues in Hungary due to high levels of discrimination, intense anti-Romani sentiment and, as a result, near full exclusion in some areas, often as a direct result of government policies in other areas.