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Legislation

On guard to guarantee entitlement minority communities, including the Roma, in Poland is Polish Constitution, which in Article. 35 provides that:
"The Republic of Poland shall ensure Polish citizens belonging to national or ethnic minorities the freedom to maintain and develop their own language, to maintain customs and traditions and their own culture," and that "national and ethnic minorities have the right to establish their own educational, and cultural institutions designed to protect their religious identity and participate in the resolution of the matters concerning their cultural identity "

 

The provisions of the Constitution are further developed in the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language. It is in this bill that the matters have been settled, related to the preservation and development of the cultural identity of national and ethnic minorities. It has also been settled how to implement the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of their ethnic origin, and concerning those matters, tasks and competencies of government administration and local government units. The Roma community in Poland is treated as an ethnic minority due to its lack of identification with a nation organized in its own state - in the light of the Law on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language.

 

In recent years there have been many legislative initiatives aimed at ensuring the national minorities the ethnic equality in various areas of socio-economic life.
A manifestation of these actions is to establish or revise, among others, the following acts:

 

1) The Labour Code, dating from 1st January 2004 - it prohibits any discrimination based on ethnicity,
2) The Act on Employment Promotion and Labour Market Institutions, containing anti-discrimination legislation in the labour market,
3) Social Assistance Act, stipulating that the persons holding Polish citizenship, domiciled and residents in the territory of the Republic of Poland, are entitled to social assistance benefits,
4) The Act on Elections to the Polish Sejm and the Senate of the Republic of Poland that guarantees the national and ethnic minorities special rights to participate in public life.

 

The legal guarantees for ethnic minorities under the existing law are: the freedom of positive and negative determination of their own belonging to minorities, the protection of information on their membership in a minority, the prohibition of forced assimilation and the prohibition of the measures aimed at changing national or ethnic proportions on the territories inhabited by minorities, the right to the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms individually as well as together with others, the right to equality before the law and the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of minority, the right to use minority languages, the right to use and spell first and last names according to the spelling rules of the minority language, the right to learn the minority language or in the minority language, the right to learn history and culture and the right to state support measures to protect, preserve and develop the cultural identity of minorities.

 

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