Migration and new minorities in Slovakia after 1989

Abstract The paper first describes the situation of minorities and migration in Slovakia and then deals with the legal regulation of national and ethnic minorities, with a special focus on the process of the recognition of officially recognised minorities. In Slovakia, constitutional regulation and the law taxonomically named recognised national minorities only in the socialist period between 1960 and 1990. The granting of official minority status has otherwise been mostly implicit. The post-1992 situation is further complicated by the fact that Slovakia does not have a comprehensive law on minorities that would regulate the recognition process in some form. Formal recognition is therefore de facto achieved by a community being invited to join a National Minority Council created by the Slovak Government. However, this no longer confers any special rights other than representation, because this process is linked to community numbers or other legal aspects. The situation is most similar to that in the Czech Republic, except that the Czechs have had a minority law since 2004. So far, three new migrant minorities in Slovakia have managed to obtain this type of recognition – the Russians, the Serbs, and the Vietnamese. Recognition of the Moravian minority is unique and is due more to the complicated Czech-Slovak relations of the 1990s than to any significant migration processes.