As the head of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center and member of the Presidium of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People Eskender Bariev said on the morning of June 5, “this morning a historic procedure began for both the Crimean Tatar People, and for Ukraine and the indigenous peoples of the world”.
Bariev announced the start of the procedure for securing the legal status of the representative body of the indigenous people of Ukraine for the Mejlis, in accordance with the law “On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” adopted in 2021 and the Procedure for securing such a legal status approved by the Ukrainian government in 2022.
Let us recall that Prof. Borys Babin, an expert of our Association, took an active part both in the development of draft laws, which later became the text of the said law, and in the activities of the working group for the development of this Procedure.
As a member of the Mejlis’s Presidium pointed out, the documents were submitted to the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, noting that “there is a beginning, I hope we will get the result in the near future”.
It should be noted that, as the Association knows, a certain delay in the submission of documents after the adoption of the Procedure by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine last autumn was due to their collection in the occupied Crimea and transfer to the Mejlis by activists, since the processes of forming the current composition of the Mejlis took place before the occupation of the peninsula.
At the same time, some public figures have recently tried to speculate on this delay in securing the legal status of the Mejlis, recognized by Ukraine, by a parliamentary resolution, as a representative body of the Crimean Tatars back in 2014.
As Professor Babin wrote on social networks on this occasion on June 5, “big things have small beginnings”.
