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More than 70 officials and NGO representatives from Europe, Asia and USA took part in the OSCE Supplementary Human Dimensions Meeting on Education of Persons Belonging to National Minorities. It was organized by the Kazakhstan Chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Knut Vollebaek. The meeting took place on July 22 and 23 in Vienna.

“Education has been and continues to be central to the work of successive OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. It is crucial in all societies… In a multi-ethnic society, however, it is even more crucial because it promotes cohesion and integration between different ethnic groups.”, stated in his Opening remarks Mr. Knut Vollebaek, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. He outlined two crucial topics in this direction. The first one is intercultural education and language education: the modern educational system should provide the minorities with the chance to learn about their history, culture and language. The second one is the increasing trend towards segregated education in many OSCE States. “I am so concerned about the proliferation of parallel educational structures, where children of different ethnicity do not interact and grow up in parallel worlds. It is the task of governments, civil society activists and us to stress the importance of integrated education, explained the High Commissioner.

The meeting agenda included three main sessions: Facilitating integrated education in Schools, Access to higher education and Adult education. During these sessions presentations and statements from governmental officials and civil society activists were presented.

The issue of Roma education was one of the most frequently discussed. The Roma activists invited to the forum (Andrzej Mirga from OSCE ODIHR, Isabela Mihalache, Stanislav Daniel from ERRC, Irfan Martez from NRC – Macedonia and Deyan Kolev from Amalipe – Bulgaria) were one of the most active participants. They stressed the necessity of overcoming the huge school segregation of Roma children in special schools for mentally disabled or in segregated “Roma” schools, the necessity of intercultural education and education on Roma language as well as the need of more Roma in university education.

Deyan Kolev, Chairman of Center Amalipe, presented three statements. The first one was about the preparation of new Public Education Act in

Bulgaria. He called upon Bulgarian authorities to include in the law 4 main requirements of the working group composed by different significant Roma NGOs. Deyan Kolev presented also the Roma Health Scholarship Program implemented in Romania and Bulgaria as successful example for increasing the number of Roma in universities and at the same time maintaining their connections with the Roma community. In his third statement Deyan Kolev shared the experience from implementation of the National Program for Literacy of Roma and stressed the necessity of motivation: the Program is successful mainly at places in which Roma NGOs were engaged to motivate the community; it is necessary all future programs in this direction to outsource funds for strong motivation campaign, insisted Kolev. He also explained that education should be a mean for self-organizing and empowering Roma community: if this happens, it would become a strong value.