The ruling comes after a request from the Ukrainian parliament. Fifty-two deputies asked the Court to provide a legal assessment of the decree.

“As it happens, language policies in our country are a sensitive issue, especially during an election campaign. But the Constitutional Court acted on this case in strict accordance with the Constitution and laws and did not seek to politicize the issue in any way,” commented Chair of the Court Andrey Strizhak.

Use of Russian language and the attempts of Ukrainian authorities to limit it is a major point of dispute in Ukraine. Yulia Timoshenko has been pushing for giving privileged treatment to the Ukrainian language as befitting the country’s only state language. Her rival at the presidential elections, Victor Yanukovich, believes it violates the rights of the country’s large Russian-speaking minority and promised to make Russian a second state language.