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Strategic litigation for bilingual street names
Tîrgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely, Oradea/Nagyvárad, Satu Mare/Szatmárnémeti, 2016-2018 ℘
In 2016 CEMO has initiated strategic litigation cases against the mayor’s office of Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely, Oradea/Nagyvárad, Satu Mare/Szatmárnémeti as several hundred thousands of Hungarians are being affected in these three localities. The street name plates in these settlements 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 these towns. 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”.
When requests were submitted by civil society to the Mayor’s Office of three of these towns, the local authorities stressed in their official reply that the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (and implicitly the FCNM) could not be applied to bilingual street signs given that domestic law does not stipulate this legal obligation, and the Law no 215/2001 does not allow the display of bilingual street signs.
The first strategic trial took place on March 2, 2017 at the Satu-Mare/Szatmárnémeti Court and the defendant was the Mayor’s Office of Satu-Mare/Szatmárnémeti. Our claims were not accepted by the first instance court, our organization lost the case and it was transferred to the Appeal Court (Oradea-Nagyvárad). The appeal court has accepted the argumentation of the Mayor’s office’s representatives and has rejected our claims related to the placing of the bilingual street names in Satu-Mare/Szatmárnémeti. (Decision number: 2424/CA/2017).
In Szatmár lawsuits, Szatmár’s Social Democratic Party (PSD) former Mayor, Dorel Coica and the current mayor Gábor Kereskényi (RMDSZ-DAHR) argued that there is no legal framework for placing bilingual street signs and that posting bilingual street signs would burden the city budget.The city’s former and present mayor stated that the international law references mentioned by our NGO (European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages) include merely principles and these are not obligations.
The bilingual street names cases in the cities Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely and Oradea/Nagyvárad were lost in the court of first instance. In the beginning of 2018 we have filed our appeal to the Court of Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely and we are waiting to receive the judge’s argumentation from the court of Oradea/Nagyvárad with the aim to formulate our appeal.