Digital database
Digital database of minority relevant legal texts from the European area
Since the political change in 1989, the nationality or minority problem has vehemently returned to the political consciousness of Europe. It quickly became clear that unresolved minority issues have a potential for conflict that can rise to wars - the Yugoslav crisis, later the Kosovo crisis and, most recently, the Ukraine crisis are eloquent examples of this.
That is why, from 1990, the relevant international governmental organizations have adopted this topic with increasing intensity. First, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE / OSCE), then the United Nations and the Council of Europe, and finally the EU (which has, due to the recently successfully completed petition for the European Citizens' Initiative "Minority safepack", to deal with the issue soon in a deeper way).
The culmination of minority politics in Europe so far was the adoption, in 1992 by the Council of Europe, of the two conventions Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML).
While these two fundamental texts can easily be accessed on the Internet - and even on several official websites - a multitude of other legal texts, which also address minority issues and are of high documentary and informative value, are difficult or impossible to consult.
The difficult consultation results from the fact that the information behavior (and information needs) of both the public and science have changed completely. The focus is on the rapid availability of any information in the Worldwide Web; printed matter or even original sources have dropped significantly in the consultation frequency. However, this is accompanied by a great loss of information. A few examples are to be cited as representative of a large number of such documents: the draft additional protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights of the FUEN (Ermacora / Pan 1992) was an important basis for the redaction of the FCNM; the text cannot be consulted electronically; neither Council of Europe Recommendation 1201 (1993) (recommendation for an additional protocol to the ECHR) nor the 1994 FUEN Draft Special Autonomy Convention. A last example is the Explanatory Report to the Council of Europe Congress Recommendation 286 (2019) "Minority languages - a valuable asset for regional development", whose content is the most important part of the recommendation.
The SVI, through its early preoccupation with the minority issue, which dates back well beyond 1989 and ultimately to its founding in 1961, has a considerable corpus of such texts, which, through digitization, would be made more accessible to international research.
Even for those relevant texts that are now available on the net (for example, the decisions of the Venice Commission), a systematic collection in the form of a lexical-browser would be able to take on the functions of a very useful bibliography, making it a first-order desideratum.