OREANDA-NEWS Today, June 7, 2022, the Cabinet of Ministers of Latvia approved amendments to the law on education, which provide for the transition to getting education only in the Latvian language. The whole process will take about three years. The amendments imply that at the first stage, students of preschool educational institutions and students of the first, fourth and seventh grades will switch to the new curriculum, then students of the second, fifth and eighth grades, and in the 2025-2026 academic year, all children will be getting education in their state language.

Anita Muizhniece, the Minister of Education and Science of Latvia, commented on the question saying that the system has existed for 30 years, and today it's time to change something. She is sure that these changes should have been made back in the 1990s.

Muizhniece added that the Government should take measures as soon as possible, because if the system is not corrected today, there will be bad consequences in future.

It is noted that at the stage of primary education, schoolchildren representing national minorities will still have the right to study the language and history of the culture of minorities. About 1.8 million people live in Latvia. About 40% of them are Russian-speaking. Latvia has one state language - Latvian. The Russian language has the status of a foreign language.

The initiatives of the Latvian authorities to make education in the Latvian language have repeatedly provoked criticism from the Russian-speaking parties and associations of the republic. A lot of mass protest demonstrations took place in the country. The Social Democratic Party "Consent", which represents the interests of the Russian-speaking population of Latvia, tried to challenge the legality of the reform in the Constitutional Court, but failed. The Russian Foreign Ministry, commenting on the court's verdict, called on the international human rights community to "pay attention to the 'linguistic terror' carried out by the Latvian authorities against national minorities."