July 11, 2000
Representatives of international organizations in Latvia will receive next week a petition signed by 56,000 residents of the country supporting the Latvian Human Rights Committee's demand that non-citizens be allowed to vote in local elections. The petition will be posted to organizations that do not have offices in Latvia, organizers of the collection of signatures told the press today.
Committee activists will have a meeting with representatives of the OSCE mission and later with United Nations and Council
of Europe officials who will receive copies of the petition, Tatyana Zhdanok of the left-wing For Human Rights in a United
Latvia said.
Copies of the petition will be posted to the Council of Baltic Sea States and international organizations protecting the rights of
national minorities.
The signatures have been collected since 3rd March.
The authors of the petition call for exerting influence on the Latvian government so as to make it allow non-citizens who have lived in the country for at least five years to vote in local elections. They also call for making it possible to use the languages of national minorities publicly where minorities make a sizable fraction of the population, provide opportunities to receive education in the mother tongue and high quality learning of the state language, Latvian.
The new legislation on education and the state language have created a legal framework for "a new way to discriminate against national minorities," the petition says. The petition lists various legal provisions that, it says, discriminate against non-citizens in both naturalization and choice of trade.
The strict division of society along ethnic lines is to blame for the political, economic and demographic crises in Latvia, the petition says. Only citizens of the country enjoy now a right to vote in local elections.
