Lack of bilingual street names in in Tîrgu-Mureș Marosvásárhely

Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely, 2014- 2017℘

The issue of the monolingual and partially bilingual street name was presented in our previous Shadow Report, sadly in the last five years the situation remained unchanged. In May 2014 our NGO started an advocacy cause called “We want bilingual street names in Tîrgu-Mureș/Marosvásárhely”. The advocacy campaign’s aim was to require the placement of the bilingual street names from the Mayor’s office.

The campaign started with a petition which has been signed by several thousand persons, citizens of the town. In the petition we declared the following : “Even though 25 years have passed after the collapse of the communism and the legislation protecting the rights of the ethnic minorities has been modified, nevertheless the street name plates of the town do not reflect the multilingualism and multiculturalism of the town. The street name plates are presently practically monolingual, the names of the streets and squares are not translated into Hungarian, the mother tongue of the ethnic Hungarians that live in this town. In Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely lives the biggest Hungarian community in Romania, whose mother tongue is almost completely omitted from the monolingual street name plates, even though based on the present legislation, these could be bilingual. While the Romanian community is able to read the street and square names on their mother tongue, the ethnic Hungarians living in the same town see the words “street” and “square” translated into Hungarian, however the street and square names are not translated. For instance the Freedom street which would be called Libertăţii street in Romanian and Szabadság utca in Hungarian; this street’s name plate should look like like this: strada Libertăţii/Szabadság utca. Instead it looks like this. strada Libertăţii utca. The word Freedom is not translated into Hungarian, only the word street”.

Parallel to the petition in April, 2014 our NGO has submitted an official complaint letter to NCCD in which we claimed that the present format of the town’s street names plates are discriminative towards the Hungarian community of Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely. In July 2014,  the Steering Committee of the Council in its decision has declared discriminative, the monolingual and partially bilingual, format of the street and square names’ plates. The Mayor’s office has not accepted the NCCD decision and filed an appeal to the Courts of Appeal in September of the same year. In its appeal the Mayor declares that the Law on Public Administration does not allow the placement of the bilingual street names, more than that the present legislation prohibits this.

The Courts of Appeal in its decision number 16, from February 10, 2015 accepted the viewpoint of the Mayor’s office and has decided the cancellation of the NCCD decision. An appeal request was submitted to the High Court of Cassation and Justice in June 2015. The High Court has accepted the viewpoints of the Appeal Court and the Mayor’s office’s arguments and in its decision nr. 3712/2017 from 21st of November 2017 cancelled the NCCD decisions stating that the lack of bilingual street names, the monolingual or partially bilingual name plates (using the words street and square after the street name placed solely in Romanian) is not discriminative.