Press Release

Florina/Lerin 02.12.2005

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A European Free Alliance- Rainbow delegation visited Brussels during the last days of November to participate at a UN Conference focused on Roma and other minorities in "old" EU member states.

At its presentation, EFA-Rainbow referred to the extremely difficult conditions almost all minority groups in Greece still have to face, something that's also recorded to the reports published by various international organizations. In particular, the Macedonians in Greece have to confront the inflexible and highly hypocritical attitude of the Greek authorities and their ongoing refusal to participate in a dialogue that could improve today's- unacceptable for an EU member state- conditions in issues like the Macedonian language.
Therefore, the strict and continuous control of the implementation of the Copenhagen criteria for all EU members (not selectively only for the new or the candidate ones) and the imposition of sanctions if necessary, are of utmost importance

The EFA-Rainbow delegation was also received by the EFA-EPP President Mrs. Nelly Maes and additionally met with parliamentarians and European Commission officials, in order to brief them about all issues concerning the Macedonians in Greece. Consequently, the Petition Commission of the European Parliament has initially accepted the Petition application that EFA-Rainbow filed last summer and forwarded it to the European Commission for thorough examination.

The Petition refers to the clear violation of the European Convention for Human Rights from Greece. Among other things, it requests the revocation of the racist law 1266/1982 that deprives until today from the forcibly expatriated Macedonian political refugees during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the right to return to their birth places.

During the visit of the EFA-Rainbow members to Brussels, Mrs. Nelly Maes met with a highly-ranked diplomat of the Greek Embassy in the Belgian capital. Despite the fact that a meeting request with the Greek Ambassador was sent from EFA-EPP about a month ago before the visit, as well as the repeated attempts to get an answer, this was received literally the last moment and under the precondition that only Mrs. Maes would be present.

This comes as no surprise, judging from the recent similar incident (early November) when the Greek Ministry of Education excluded EFA-Rainbow from the scheduled meeting with the president of the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN). Therefore, EFA-Rainbow would like, for yet another time, to invite the Greek authorities to start a mutually beneficial dialogue. After all, they need to realize that this elusive & cyclical policy has led only to deadlocks so far and does not even remotely belong to a European Union at the 21st century._

The EFA- Rainbow Press Office