Linguistic rights in the local public administration at the Mayor’s Office in Marosvásárhely
Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely, 2016- December 31, 2017℘
In 2016 our organization initiated several legal procedures, official complaints and data requests against the mayor’s office in Marosvásárhely. The aim of these legal steps is to encourage the use of Hungarian language in the mayor’s office as set in the Law on Public Administration number 215 from 2001. Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely is the county capital of of Maros County, where the largest urban Hungarian community lives, the percentage of Hungarian employees in the Mayor’s office has significantly decreased in the last decades. The same applies to the subordinate units of the mayor’s office as well, including the Local Police Department, which subordinates to the mayor’s office.
Our organization continuously monitors the implementation of the minority language rights application within the Mayor’s Office of Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely and one of our goals is to influence the institution to hire to more Hungarian-speaking staff members in order to comply with the existing legal provisions. At present the Hungarian speaking community members are not able to use their mother tongue within the Mayor’s office given that there are not enough Hungarian speaker clerks available to provide them information in Hungarian.