Mintimer Shaimiev: “All talks of allegedly language separatism in connection with transfer from Cyrillic to Latin are baseless and speculative.”

Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev thinks that all talks of allegedly language separatism in connection with transfer from Cyrillic to Latin are baseless and speculative. In his interview with the Interfax M.Shaimiev said that this issue was over-politicized and called amendments to the Law ”On languages of the RF peoples” adopted by the State Duma and prohibiting transfer from Cyrillic “legally inadequate”.

In the President’s opinion, the prohibition contradicts both the Declaration on languages of the peoples of Russia and the Russian Constitution. The Tatarstan leader referred to existing international regulations, in particular the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992. He also pointed out that the issues of languages and scripts of the population belong to the competence of the RF subjects and its peoples. “I consider this step of the State Duma as interference with the human rights”, he said.

According to him, for the republic and its leadership, the problem of transfer to Latin is not an easy issue. This process gained ambiguous reaction also in the Tatar Diaspora. “We treat this problem seriously and hence decided to carry out an experiment on transfer to Latin estimated for a long period of time,” the Tatar President emphasized.