Dear Mr Hansen,

As good friends of FUEN we follow its work and greatly appreciate its decision made at the Moscow congress in the interests of protecting the rights of the Hungarians in Romania. We appreciate your support for the initiative of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) to launch a citizens’ initiative aimed at adoption of general legislation on protection of minorities at the European level. However, we regret to note that the European Union does not have the legislative competence for such legislation to be adopted, yet the elaboration of a legal act is the only thing one is allowed to request through a citizens’ initiative.

It is well known that attempts have been made for 40 years to have mandatory minority protection legislation adopted in the Union, but even today that is not possible without amending the EU treaties. The Treaty of Lisbon did not bring any change in that sense. We ourselves greatly sympathise with the efforts made by the members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages and trust that their work will reap rewards sooner or later.

I wish to inform you that the Szekler National Council intends to launch a citizens’ initiative which, if successful, would improve the situation of an appreciable proportion of the minorities living in the Union. We will request the framing of legislation that would guarantee the conditions for economic, social and territorial cohesion in regions with special national, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic characteristics without those characteristics changing.

I wish to stress that our proposal is not in conflict with the RMDSZ initiative, and should that initiative take concrete shape and be registered by the Commission, we are ready to support it and encourage our partners to do likewise.

Earlier we spoke with Dr. Martha Stocker, deputy president of FUEN, Herbert Dorfmann, MEP, and Günther Ratz, coordinator of the European Academy of Bolzano, on this subject, and drew up our proposal in the spirit of those talks.

More information about our initiative can be found on the www.nationalregions.eu website. Please find enclosed a detailed description of the initiative. We would be grateful if you could study our proposal, make your observations and lend your support to the initiative.

Yours respectfully,

Balázs Izsák

President of the Szekler National Council

Marosvásárhely, 15 June 2012