BRATISLAVA (Reuter) - Slovakia`s Constitutional Court, in a move likely to dismay the country`s 500,000-strong Hungarian minority, on Tuesday upheld a controversial law declaring Slovak the only official language. Parliament, dominated by the Slovak nationalist ruling coalition, passed the law in November 1995 to replace one which permitted the use of other languages in communities with large ethnic minorities. Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar promised that the language law would be followed by further legislation on the use of minority languages, but this has yet to materialise. Both the United States and European Union have repeatedly criticised Slovakia`s failure to pass a minority language law. The EU cited the absence of such a law as one reason it did not invite Slovakia for membership talks. The court`s ruling, published on Tuesday, is likely to put more strain on relations between Slovakia and neighbouring Hungary. The two are embroiled in a row over a Slovak proposal for ethnic Hungarians to move to Hungary. "I asked the Hungarian government to commit itself to accept citizens of Hungarian origin, who do not wish to live in Slovakia, as its state citizens, on the condition that neither side exerts pressure on these people," Mečiar said last Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn has dismissed the idea as "a disgrace" and has refused to discuss it with Bratislava. The proposal has provoked an outcry because of the memories it evokes of forced removals of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe at the end of World War Two, and the recent ethnic carnage in former Yugoslavia. Some Slovak opposition politicians and a Hungarian party have likened the idea to "ethnic cleansing". In 1945 the then-Czechoslovak government ordered the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Germans and Hungarians it held collectively responsible for the actions of Germany and its ally Hungary in World War Two. Areas of Slovakia, which used to be part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were handed over to Hungary by Nazi Germany during World War Two but returned to Czechoslovakia by the Allies after the German defeat.