Integration monitor is a daily Latvian press digest on ethnic minority and society integration issues. The Monitor reviews the biggest Latvian dailies: Diena, Latvijas Avize, Neatkariga (in Latvian language), Vesti Segodnya (in Russian language). In specific cases other information sources are used. Latvian Centre for Human Rights is not responsible for information published by the media.

• Interviews with Ombudsman candidate Anita Kovalevska
• Telegraf: translation of mathematics olympiad tasks used to ensure equal treatment of minority schools pupils

Diena and Latvijas Avize interviewed Ombudsman candidate Anita Kovalevska, Administrative court judge. She believes the Ombudsman does not necessarily needs a degree in law, yet there is a clear need to have knowledge and experience in rights protection, while the job itself requires usage of legal arguments. Many issues, which currently are being dealt with by Latvian courts, are actually much more appropriate for the Ombudsmans Office. Anita Kovalevska believes that the Law on the Ombudsmans Office grants sufficient amount of power, yet it is important to use it fully – to follow-up investigations and recommendations, initiate administrative and civil cases or cases at the Constitutional Court. It is highly important to communicate with the mass media and the wider society, because once the view of the Ombudsman is well argued and explained, the politicians and civil servants could hardly refuse to implement it. The main human rights problems and risks in Latvia at the moment are related to crisis and budget cuts, which impact social rights, survival of ordinary people, which also spill over to other rights. Judging by the amount of complaints at the European Court of Human Rights, issues such as conditions in prisons, usage of detention, as well as the length of court proceedings are very topical human rights issues in Latvia.

Telegraf writes that this year, the tasks of school mathematics olympiad for pupils of 5-8 grades were not translated into Russian. Many Russian minority schools are officially allowed to teach up to 40% of time in native language, thus many children are studying mathematics in Russian and are not used to mathematic terminology in Latvian. In order to ensure equal treatment of the pupils and to make sure it is the knowledge of mathematics, not of the state language is being tested in olympiad, its tasks were always translated. Unannounced lack of translation this year resulted in confusion among the teachers and pupils. Representative of the State curriculum centre admits the lack of translation this year was an unfortunate experiment, while representative of the External mathematics school of the University of Latvia blames insufficient funding.