ECMI Infochannel

PLURILINGMEDIA intends to advance collaboration and bring coherence to the field of European media from the perspective of language plurality, encouraging involvement of scholars in related disciplines and facilitating knowledge transfer between academics and practitioners. This incorporates the digitalisation shifts affecting consumption and provision of media, providing opportunities and threats to journalists, as well as influencing policymakers, educators and other stakeholders. Academics working on these topics mostly work on singular linguistic spheres and there remains a deficiency of knowledge transfer across the dimensions of academic discipline, career-stage, geography and industry. 

It is not every day that we have the opportunity to present our work at the heart of the European Union. On 28 September, the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) was invited to Brussels to contribute to a workshop before the European Parliament’s Committee on Petitions (PETI). The session focused on an important question for the EU enlargement process: how can the rights of national minorities be effectively monitored and strengthened in candidate countries? ECMI Director Vello Pettai attended the event together with Senior Researchers Ljubica Djordjević and Kyriaki Topidi. The three researchers presented the main findings of a comprehensive briefing commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights, Equality and Culture.

In recent enlargement rounds, the European Union has increasingly relied on a specific instrument to drive fundamental reforms: dedicated Action Plans for national minorities as formal accession conditions. But do these strategic documents actually produce tangible improvements on the ground, or do they risk becoming administrative box-ticking exercises designed primarily to satisfy screening benchmarks? This crucial question stood at the centre of an international expert conference hosted on 23 September 2026 by the  European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) and the NGO SIEC / Forum for Non-Majority Communities at the Stone Bridge Hotel in Skopje. Titled "Action Plans for National Minorities as Part of EU Accession: Comparative Policy Analysis," the event brought together researchers, government officials, and civil society representatives to examine the practical experiences of the three candidate countries where the EU has made such plans mandatory: Serbia, Ukraine, and North Macedonia.