Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe High Commissioner on National Minorities
EDUCATION AS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SOCIAL COHESION
address by Christophe Kamp
OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities
to the Human Dimension Committee
[Check against delivery]
Vienna, Austria – 15 September 2026 -2-
Distinguished Chair, Excellencies, Colleagues,
Let me begin by thanking the Chairpersonship of the Human Dimension Committee, and you personally, Ambassador de Ruijter, for placing this subject on your agenda. Multilingual education is not only a measure to protect minority rights or to accommodate their aspirations. It is an investment in the cohesion and resilience of the whole of society.
We are used to thinking of infrastructure as roads, railways, energy grids — the systems that hold a society together and keep it functioning. I would ask you to think of education in the same way. A school is not only a place where children acquire knowledge. It is where a society decides, day after day, who belongs, whose language has value, and whether difference is treated as a threat or as a shared inheritance and strength. Education is part of the infrastructure of cohesion. And cohesion is a precondition for peace and security.
My mandate focuses on conflict prevention. While working on education may seem far removed from that task, it is not. When I examine the situations that have led to tension, and at times have escalated into violence, I often find their earliest traces in the classroom — in young people educated entirely apart from one another, not learning each other’s language, and taught to see each other as strangers. On the other hand, a peaceful society is often built on an education system that lays the foundations for mutual understanding, inclusion and trust. Such education systems can help strengthen confidence in the future, protect linguistic and cultural diversity, and ensure that every child has the opportunity to thrive. This is why I treat education as one of the central files of my work.
Multilingual education systems have proven particularly effective in fostering social cohesion. Such systems hold benefits for minority-language speakers, including improved educational outcomes, inclusion and participation. They allow children to learn in languages they understand and value, while also creating pathways to communicate across linguistic and cultural communities. By recognizing and respecting linguistic diversity, education can strengthen a sense of belonging and build mutual understanding. In diverse societies, investing -3-
in multilingual education is therefore not only an investment in children’s learning, but also in trust, inclusion and a shared future.
Communities able to communicate across linguistic boundaries are also more resistant to disinformation. A citizen who commands both the official language and their own, who has been educated to weigh more than one perspective, is a citizen less easily captured by those who trade in fear and falsehood. Multilingual education is, in this sense, part of our societal resilience.
Allow me to be direct about what effective education in diverse societies requires, because the picture across our region is uneven.
It requires holding two objectives together, not trading one against the other. Every child belonging to a national minority must have a genuine opportunity to master the official language. This is the key to equal access to further education, to the labour market, and to full participation in public and socio-economic life. But acquiring the official language must never come at the price of losing one’s own. The maintenance of the minority language — one’s mother tongue — and education through it is a right. And, as our Hague Recommendations set out thirty years ago, the two goals are complementary. A well-designed system does both. They are, in fact, mutually reinforcing: a strong foundation in the mother tongue supports, rather than hinders, the acquisition of the State language, as the cognitive and literacy skills developed in the first language transfer to the second. A well-designed system does not ask children to choose between the two — it uses one to strengthen the other.
And here I must repeat a lesson that my predecessors learned and that I see confirmed year after year: good laws and generous declarations are not enough. In many States the legal picture is encouraging on paper, yet a gap opens between the norm and the daily reality. Rights that exist in a statute but not in a classroom are not rights a parent can rely on. Closing that gap is a positive obligation of the State, and it is not achieved for free. It requires teachers trained in the specific methodology of teaching the official language as a second language, which is a distinct craft. It requires modern textbooks in minority languages. It requires realistic timelines that give schools the chance to prepare, rather than reforms rushed for reasons that have more to do with the political calendar than with the interests of children. Without resources, the finest framework remains a promise unkept. -4-
Finally, I want to underscore that language in education is not only a matter of domestic concern. The way in which languages are regulated in one jurisdiction can have a significant bearing on communities in others, and that is particularly so where the same languages are spoken on both sides of a border. Supporting participating States in exploring co-operation on these questions is a central element of my office’s work on multilingual education. I am pleased to note that one such initiative will take place on 22 October, when, with the support of Turkmenistan, I will convene in Ashgabat a ministerial round table with the ministers responsible for education of all five States of Central Asia and Mongolia, for a practical discussion on where regional co-operation in education, and in multilingual education in particular, can be taken forward. This engagement is part of my office’s ongoing and previous support to multilingual education programmes across the OSCE area, also including in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, to name a few.
I will stop here, because the real value this afternoon lies with our panellists, who bring precisely what my remarks cannot — insights from the work in practice. We will hear from Ms. Stoianova on the tools and methodologies that make multilingual education work; from Professor Bogdziewicz on the experience of building and reforming a legal framework for minority education, and the lessons that carries; and from Mr. Chupryna on how Ukraine is developing its own concept of multilingual education under conditions few of us can imagine. Together they move us from principle to the ground, which is where these questions are decided.
I look forward to our discussion, including to hearing where things have not worked — because that is where we learn the most.
Thank you.