Sergey Mishin, the representative of the Civil Society Council working under the President of Moldova, said the Russian speakers in the Republic of Moldova are discriminated by the courts of law, medical and education institutions and also by ministries and the local public administration of Chisinau. In a news conference at IPN, Sergey Mishin said the websites of the given institutions cannot be accessed in Russian and, even if some of the websites have the Russian version too, the information there hasn’t been updated for many years.

The Russian version of the Parliament’s website is absent. The information there is only in Romanian, English and French. Sergey Mishin noted that one third of the Moldovan citizens are this way discriminated on language-related grounds by Speaker Andrian Candu and the parliamentary majority.

According to the activist, the law on access to information and the law on the protection of the national minorities, which provide that the state guarantees and is obliged to ensure the respect for the rights of the national minorities, are not obeyed. “You say that we should know the official language, and we are ready to learn, but why don’t Parliament and the parliamentary majority create conditions for us to be able to study the language?” Sergey Mishin asked rhetorically.

Ilia Kisilev, of the public association “Zaria”, said he several times complained to the National Council for Combating Discrimination about the fact that the websites of the Ministry of Justice, the Chisinau City Hall and Parliament do not have the Russian version. The Council ascertained that this is an act of discrimination, but the situation didn’t change and the websites in Russian continue to be absent or are not updated.

Mihail Ahremtsev, president of the public organization “Zaria”, noted that the politicians who claim to be pro-Europeans do not promote the European values. The government does nothing to protect the ethnic minorities and to ensure the functioning of languages on the country’s territory.

At the end of August, the public association “Za Russkii Iazyk” (“For the Russian Language”), launched a campaign to collect signatures in favor of having Moldovan as the official language and Russian as the official language of interethnic communication. The initiators of the campaign aim to collect up to 500,000 signatures during three months.