a law on minorities is mentioned as if progress were imminent: the bill, according to the September 26 Rehn report, “is still being discussed in parliament.”" In fact, the draft law submitted by the government on May 19, 2005, has been held up (to this day!) through endless bureaucratic delays in various parliamentary committees.

Already at the April 3, 2006 Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET) hearing with the Enlargement Commissioner, concerned Members of the European Parliament raised the lack of progress, but Mr. Rehn dodged their questions.

In late April, 17 civic organizations in Romania were joined by 5,000 individual letter writers, petitioning the Commissioner to make human rights an integral component of his discussions with the Romanian government. Though moderate and well-grounded, the letters went unanswered, and the requests were roundly ignored in Commissioner Rehn's apparent haste to curry favor with the Romanian leadership.

EP Criterion: "[the European Parliament] reiterates that additional measures need to be taken to ensure the protection of the Hungarian minority in accordance with the principles of subsidiary and cultural autonomy. "

20,000 people called for "Autonomy for Székelyland, freedom for the Székelys" at a March 15, 2006 Grand Assembly held in Székelyudvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc, which adopted a Székely Manifesto by public acclamation, demanding internal self-determination, local democracy and self-administration for the region. 74 percent of the 1 million people who live in the traditional region of the Székelys [the counties of Hargita/Harghita, Kovászna/Covasna and Maros/ Mures], belong to this indigenous Hungarian population. Jointly organized by the Székely National Council and Transylvanian Hungarian National Council, the gathering came under unprecedented assault by all Romanian parties and the Romanian President himself, whose denunciations spread unsubstantiated fears of the region's secession, a scenario never contemplated by the Hungarian community. Romanian President Traian Basescu summoned local mayor Jenõ Szász to Bucharest and warned him not to proclaim the region's autonomy as it contravenes with the Romanian constitution. Even more troubling is the fact that up until the evening before the Grand Székely Assembly, the President continued to negotiate with ultra-nationalist Greater Romania Party President Corneliu Vadim Tudor on modalities of "obstructing the harmful meeting."

20,000 people demand self-administration for the region inhabited by the Székely population

Corneliu Vadim Tudor offered to organize a counter-demonstration in the town "bringing 100,000 true Romanian patriots to defend the motherland from the barbaric Hungarian hordes," an offer which President Bãsescu ultimately declined. Béla Markó, President of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR) warned "it is very distressing that in 2006 someone is threatening the rights of free speech and public assembly through the planned deployment of aggressive crowds."

EP Criterion: "[the European Parliament] emphasizes the need to speed up implementation of the law on the restitution of property."

"As regards property restitution, some progress has been made. The legislation has been modified to streamline the regime of establishment and payments of compensations. However, the processing of claims remains slow." — EC Report on Romania, September 26, 2006, page 39 .

On March 9, 2006 Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu officially launched the Property Fund set up to compensate the victims of Communist expropriation. Essentially a public relations ploy rather than the long-overdue and genuine reparation, half of the 114 companies in the Property Fund are not listed on the Romanian Stock Exchange and therefore cannot be traded. Thus, for all intents and purposes, the Property Fund is non-functional and unable to adequately compensate former owners of previously demolished and therefore non-returnable properties. Serious doubts exist as to how and when the Property Fund, with a proposed portfolio of 14.4 Billion RON (approx. 3.9 Billion EUR), will actually compensate the approximately 180,000 former owners.

One of Romania's most serious shortcomings in implementing EU norms continues to be in the critical area of property restitution, mentioned in Article 21 of the EP's December 15, 2005 resolution. The near-total failure to return 7,500 properties confiscated from religious denominations between 1945 and 1989 by the Communist regime continues 16 years after the Romanian revolution.

2,140 of these properties were taken illegally from the four traditional Hungarian churches (Roman Catholic, Reformed, Unitarian and Lutheran). Despite various government ordinances, two laws (501/2002 and 247/2005)

and countless deadlines for implementation, the Hungarian denominations have regained actual possession of only 59 buildings, or less than 3 percent of the properties rightfully belonging to them.

Since January 2004, HHRF closely monitors the status of the 2,140 properties confiscated from the Hungarian community through a Restitution Working Group, which includes legal representatives of the affected Hungarian churches. Results are recorded in a regularly updated Database of Confiscated Church Properties, available on the Internet.

The international community has clearly and repeatedly called on Romania to remedy this flagrant human rights violation, notably in Opinion No. 176 (1993) on the application by Romania for membership of the Council of Europe and Parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1123 (1997) on the honoring of obligations and commitments by Romania.

H. Res. 191, unanimously adopted by the United States House of Representatives on May 23, 2005, identified eight specific steps the Romanian government needs to take for genuine restitution to occur, but only two of these have been realized within the past year.

EP Criterion: "[the European Parliament] calls on the Romanian authorities to fully sustain higher education for the Hungarian minority by providing the financial means needed."

Meanwhile, even a cursory examination of the Kolozsvár/Cluj-based Babes-Bolyai University homepage reveals that it is University itself that propagates false information on the availability of Hungarian education at this public institution and misrepresents the school’s history. Here are only four of the falsehoods we found:
 

1) Under "About UBB - the multicultural character" the website claims that "starting with 1995, Babes-Bolyai University has received no complaints whatsoever concerning instances of ethnic discrimination or disruptions in the multicultural system..."

This is untrue. There have been countless complaints about discrimination against Hungarians by not granting three autonomous faculties within the institution where the language of instruction is Hungarian. The aspiration for departments in Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences has been promoted by both ethnic Hungarian instructors and students within the university, the ethnic Hungarian political party DAHR, and international human rights groups like HHRF. In fact, the university website goes on to say that:

2) "...it has introduced separate lines of study, enjoying distinct representation and decision-making autonomy at any level (department, faculty, university)."

This statement is untrue considering that the Babes-Bolyai University Senate has repeatedly denied permission to create the above-mentioned three faculties. There are, in fact, only two Hungarian-run faculties at the university. Ethnic Romanians heads all others, and the ethnic Romanian majority administration consistently vetoes all Hungarian initiatives.

3) The website also says that the "Babes-Bolyai University provides complete studies in the mother tongue of the minorities, being, in this respect multilingual."

This is patently not true. In fact, it is precisely the lack of adequate Hungarian-language education that propels the Hungarian community to insist on its own public institution. First, about 30 per cent of ethnic Hungarians have to attend Romanian courses at various institutions around the country because their majors are not available anywhere in Romania in the Hungarian language.

Although their numbers would clearly warrant a separate institution (the 1.4 million Hungarians make up 6.6 percent of the country and 20 percent of Transylvania's population), for example, engineering and dentistry cannot be studied anywhere in Hungarian, in Romania. At the Babes-Bolyai University, Hungarians cannot study Business Administration, Law, European or American Studies in their native language either.

4) The homepage states that: "The Babes-Bolyai University is the oldest academic institution in Romania, which embodies the entire academic tradition in Transylvania, inaugurated with the Jesuit College founded by Prince Stephan Bathory in 1581."

This sentence is a telling example of how official Romanian history distorts and conceals the facts. On the website there is no reference at all to the fact that "the oldest academic institution in Romania" was founded and supported by ethnic Hungarian princes for over 400 years. In the Middle Ages the language of tuition was Latin, which in the early 1800s changed to Hungarian. The Hungarian-language University itself was founded by Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef in 1872 and after World War I in was taken over by the Romanian authorities. Following World War II two separate universities coexisted in the city, the Romanian-language Babes University and the Hungarian-language Bolyai University. In 1959, the two institutions were forcibly merged, and studies in Hungarian were gradually eliminated in most areas.

The current Hungarian-language version of the website makes no reference to the Hungarian tradition of the university. In fact, the history link is blank. Questioned by HHRF's Enlargement Watch - Romania in May 2006 the university administration answered "it is being prepared." It is November, yet the link promised since the Summer is still blank.