BRIEF REPORT ON THE APPLICATION BY THE SPANISHSTATE OF THE EUROPEAN CHARTER OF THE REGIONAL OR MINORITY LANGUAGES WITH REGARD TO THE CATALAN LANGUAGE
October 2007
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1.1. Presentation
1.2. The general context of this Report
1.3. General appraisal of the Second Report presented by the Spanish State on the application of the European Charter
2. Comments and Declarations presented in accordance with Article 16.2 regarding the application of part II of the European Charter: "Objectives and principles sought in accordance with paragraph 1 of Article 7 of the Charter"
2.1. Declaration with regard to the non-compliance with Article 7.1.a), c) and d): The lack of action in the recognition, the promotion and the promotion of the Catalan language
2.2. Declaration with regard to the non-compliance with Article 7.1.b) and e): The administrative divisions of the Spanish State as obstacle from the promotion of the Catalan language
2.3. Declaration with regard to the non-compliance with Article 7.2. The absence of legal effects with the coming into force of the Charter in the Spanish State.
2.4. Declaration with regard to the non-compliance with Article 7.3: The lack of promotion of mutual understanding between the linguistic groups in the State
3. Comments and Calls of Attention by the Committee of Experts, in accordance with Article 16.2, with regard to the application of Part III of the European Charter: "Measures in favour of the use of the regional or minority languages in the public life, which have to be adopted in accordance with the commitments subscribed by virtue of paragraph 2 to Article 2"
3.1. With regard to Article 8 of the Charter: Education
3.2. With regard to Article 9 of the Charter – Judicial Auithorities
3.3. With regard to Article 10 of the Charter: Public Authorities and Public Services
3.4. With regard to Article 11 of the Charter: Media
1. Introduction
1.1. Presentation
This second REPORT ON THE APPLICATION BY THE SPANISH STATE OF THE EUROPEAN CHARTER OF THE REGIONAL OR MINORITY LANGUAGES IN RELATION TO THE CATALAN LANGUAGE, October 2007, derives from the will of a set of bodies and associations that work specifically on issues related to the promotion and defence of the Catalan language, articulated around the OBSERVATORY OF THE CATALAN LANGUAGE (whose members are Acció Cultural del País Valencià, CIEMEN, the Centre UNESCO of Catalonia, the Follow-Up Committee of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, the Federation of North-Catalan organisations, the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana, the Institute of Catalan Studies, Linguapax, Obra Cultural Balear, Òmnium Cultural and Plataforma per la Llengua), that was formally set up on 14 May 2003.
The objectives of the OBSERVATORI DE LA LLENGUA CATALANA include, amongst others, that of “Setting up an authorised voice that with rigorous academic criteria can assume the role of being a technical reference point in terms of the defence of the Catalan language, within the framework of national, State and international legislation, in order to give advice and legal arguments to institutions and bodies that work for the Catalan language” and that of “evaluating the situation and the evolution of the social usage of the Catalan language in all its ambits; drawing up and distributing widely an annual report on the situation of the Catalan language, both in terms of its social usage and of compliance with existing legislation (national, State, international)”. This was followed by the specific objective of “monitoring the application of the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages, and presenting the corresponding Reports before the Committee of Experts and the Council of Europe”.
In fulfilment of this latter objective, members of the committee of experts of the Observatori de la Llengua Catalana, coordinated by Dr. Santiago Castellà of the “Rovira i Virgili” University present this REPORT on behalf of the Observatori and its member organisations. All of these organisations, as required in Article 16.2 of Part IV of the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages (henceforth referred to as the “European Charter”), are “bodies or associations legally established in a Party”, and are inscribed in the 7appropriate official registers within the SpanishState.
The Observatori de la Llengua Catalana, as the driving force for this Report, takes full responsibility for its authorship and for its presentation before the Committee of Experts of the European Charter. We remain at the latter’s disposal for the clarification or further explanation of any points arising out of this Report, for the supplying of any additional documentary evidence that may be requested, and to take part in any relevant meetings or sessions in order to contribute to the work of the Committee of Experts of the European Charter in drawing up the Report on the compliance of the Spanish State with the European Charter which the Committee will present to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, along with any recommendations that the Committee of Experts of the European Charter may consider appropriate to propose that the Committee of Ministers present to the Spanish State in its capacity as a State Party to the European Charter.
1.2. The general context of this Report
The Spanish State was one of the first to sign the European Charter[1], on the day (5 November 1992) that it was proclaimed and opened to the signature and laterratification, acceptance or approval by the member States of the Council of Europe, coherently with the active participation of the Spanish members of Parliament throughout the process of conclusion of the European Charter within the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. But several vicissitudes in the political life and the balance of political power in the Congress of Deputies and the Senate held back the signature of the instrument of ratification of the SpanishState of the European Charter until 2 February 2001: almost 10 years. It was finally delivered to the General Secretary of the Council of Europe on 9 April 2001, and came into force internationally for Spain on 1 August 2001, in accordance with the terms of Article 19.2 of the European Charter. It acquired full internal effectiveness, as an international treaty, when it was published in the Official State Gazette, No. 222, on 15 September 2001[2].
On account of the special characteristics of the material contents of the European Charter, the demonstration of the consent of a State to adopt commitments has to be accompanied by a declaration inrelation toArticle 2.2 of the European Charter[3] and also in relation to Article 3.1[4].
The Spanish State solved the issue of specifying the languages that were to be object of protection in accordance with the European Charter by referring to appropriate Articles of the Statutes of Autonomy, thus avoiding the specific naming of the regional or minority languages, and affirming to this end that
“the regional or minority languages are the languages recognized as official in the Statutes of Autonomy of the autonomous communities of the Basque Country, the Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Galicia, Valencia and Navarra” (...) “Likewise, Spain declares, to the same effect, that the languages that the statutes of autonomy protect and support in the territories where they are traditionally spoken are also understood as being regional or minority languages”.
This declaration of the Spanish State is an exercise of legal architecture to avoid naming the regional or minority languages that are to be an object of protection, aimed mainly so as not to speak about the Catalan language as being a language spoken in more than one Autonomous Community, and thus not coinciding with the regional divisions into which the State has been organised. The claim of presenting the Catalan dialectal variety spoken in Valencia, and known as "Valencian" in Article 7 of the Statute of Autonomy of the “Comunitat Valenciana”, as a language separate from Catalan, has been adopted by certain political quarters that, disregarding scientific considerations, seek the so-called linguistic segregation in order to weaken the Catalan language.
In the parliamentary debates, interrupted by the end of the VI legislature, and resumed in the VII legislature, the various political groups reached a pragmatic consensus centered on the idea of avoiding any reference to the languages that were to be an object of protection, while referring to the languages recognized as official in the various Statutes of Autonomy. Furthermore, in order to include the language of the Vall d'Aran, the Aragonese “Fabla” and Asturian, coverage was to be broadened also for languages that the Statutes of Autonomy "protect and support in the territories where they are traditionally spoken". In doing so they also opened up access to the protection of the Catalan spoken in the Community of Aragon.
The doctrinal appraisal of the Spanish Declaration of the ratification of the European Charter considers that the so-called "higher level" of protection[5] has been opted for, with two great exceptions. On the one hand, the option that is made in Section e.iii, of Paragraph 1 of Article 8, related to university education, in which university autonomy is placed above the legal status accorded to languages established by the Constitution and the various Statutes of Autonomy; and on the other hand, with regard to the media, the option made in favour of Section f.ii of Paragraph 1 of Article 11 is to “to apply existing measures for financial assistance also to audiovisual productions in the regional or minority languages", instead of opting for another possibility: "to cover the additional costs of those media which use regional or minority languages, wherever the law provides for financial assistance in general for the media". This is justified by the lack of the legal instrument required by the precept.
Spain had to present, in accordance with Article 15.1 of the Charter, its first report on the application of the Charter after the first year of being in force, that is, before August 2002. The report of the SpanishState was presented on23 September 2002[6]. From the outset, the organisations that work for the promotion and the respect of the Catalan language were aware of the strong implications that this international monitoring mechanism meant, a process that led to the creation of the Observatory of the Catalan Language, and to the commissioning of a "counterreport" to its group of Experts, in which an appraisal of the situation of the Catalan language was to be presented in the framework of the Spanish legal set-up.[7] The starting point was the negative impression caused by the Report of the State[8], which was drawn up without input from the Autonomous Communities. The basic line of reasoning of the Observatory’s Report was to highlight the need to make a transition of the monolingual Castilian legal model to a legal regulation of linguistic pluralism, interpreting the constitutional mandate of Article 3.2 and 3.3 in the terms of the European Charter.
Thus, and in accordance with Article 16 of the European Charter, the Observatory of the Catalan Language wrote its Report presenting five related Declarations to the policy applied by the Spanish State in regard to Part II (Objectives and Principles) of the Charter; and next, it made CALLS OF ATTENTION to each of the sections that of Part III of the European Charter (Measures in favour of the use of the regional or minority languages in the public life, which have to be adopted in accordance with the commitments subscribed by virtue of paragraph 2 of Article 2).
The appraisal of the Committee of Experts of the Council of Europe arrived long overdue on account of the resignation and subsequent appointment of the expert proposed by the SpanishState to the Committee of Ministers. This fact delayed the on-site visit of the delegation of the Committee of Experts initially planned in May 2003 and finally carried out in May 2004. The Committee of Experts decided to find out in situ about the situation in Iruña / Pamplona, Gasteiz / Vitoria, Bilbo/Bilbao, Oviedo and finally it concentrated in Madrid a set of meetings with public institutions and non-governmental organizations. Unfortunately it did not visit any of the Catalan-speaking territories, centring its interest on the Basquelanguage in the Basque Country and in Navarre, and in the language of Asturias (or Bable), a fact that greatly affected the contents of its conclusions, some of which are presented as being centred on the Basque language, when they are generalizable to all the languages other than Spanish (that is, Castilian) spoken in Spain.
The publication at the end of the summer of 2005 of the conclusions of the Committee of Experts[9] generated in a first reading a great disappointment in the circles of experts and the organisations that work for the language. The high level of enthusiasm about the process and the possibilities that it opened to sort the process of transition towards plurilingualism were seen blurred mainly by the confusing and contradictory way that the Committee treated Valencian. This question motivated an urgent and strongly-worded response by the Observatory of the Catalan Language[10], which ended up by affirming that
"To conclude, the Catalan Language Observatory feels compelled to make the following remarks:
1. Throughout history both Catalan and Valencian have been used along with other terms to refer to the native language of the Valencians.
2. Valencian is part of the Catalan language and is unanimously recognised as such by international linguistic science.
3. The dual designation of the Catalan language has been recognised by Spanish law (university qualifications and areas of expertise), by the Spanish government in its request that the official languages of Spain be among the official and working languages of the European Union under special conditions (memorandum of 12/12/2004), by jurisprudence (Constitutional Court, Valencian Community High Court of Justice) and also by the institution set up by the Valencian Court to ‘safeguard Valencian’ – the Valencian Academy of Language.
4. Any analysis of the situation of the Catalan language that purports to be minimally accurate must examine all regions in which it is spoken, regardless of the names given to the language in each place, and ensure that it is dealt with in the same way as the other languages with two official names in the Report: Castilian and Spanish, Euskera and Basque (Vascuence), Bable and Asturian."
But beyond this worrying issue, it is necessary to recognize the merit of the Report of the Committee of Experts of the Council of Europe, in spite of its deficiencies described in this paper, of having understood the need for a linguistic transition in Spain, from the existing model based on the supremacy of Castilian monolingualism to a multilingual model that, coherent with the contents of Article 3 of the Constitution, can ensure a correct implementation of the commitments adopted when the European Charter was ratified. We can affirm, after a thorough study of the Committee of Experts’ Report, that for the European Charter to be implemented in Spain, a new legal framework will have to be built, in which central government together with the Autonomous Communities that have their own language will promote the respect for, the knowledge of, and the use of linguistic plurality from the principle of the freedom of language choice in a plurilingual normative, political, social and cultural context[11].
The Committee of Experts considered, as far as the teaching of the Catalan language is concerned, that the only model that is respectful of the commitments to the European Charter is the model applied in Catalonia, based on linguistic immersion and non-segregation of pupils; and it considered that in Valencia and in the Balearic Islands the models of structural bilingualism are a non-compliance of the European Charter. The Committee considered that the Organic Law of the Judiciary does not guarantee access, in the citizen’s own language, to the administration of justice and to a procedure. At the same time it considered that the structure of the career of public servants working in the Administration of Justice and in the Administration of the State has to be rethought in terms of linguistic training in order to serve the citizens. In the area of public services, of the media, of economic and social life, and of cultural life, the Committee of Experts leaves Spain under suspicion, by repeatedly asking for the relevant information to be delivered in the following report. Finally, it called for a legal framework of protection and promotion of Catalan in Aragon.
In short, the Committee of Experts noted the survival of the structures and reasoning typical of Castilian monolingualism, and called for a progressive transition towards plurilingualism, advising strongly about the need to work - especially in the media - to create a climate of respect and of mutual trust among the various linguistic communities of the State.
The Committee of Experts’ Report has been and can be extremely useful to contrast the optimistic State information with the reference it frequently makes to information brought by non-governmental organisations. Every three years, Spain has to present a new report to the Committee of Experts, and if the first was in 2002, it is now time for a new report that has to be drawn up in coordination with the Autonomous Communities that have their own language, and it has to include in an exhaustive way all the requested information. It will be a good opportunity for the delegation of the Committee of Experts to visit at least one of the Catalan-speaking territories, and for the Observatory, picking up the experience of these years and the various projects carried out, to present once again an exhaustive report accompanied by all the concrete information that can help the Committee to know about the linguistic reality of Spain as regards the Catalan language.
1.3. General appraisal of the Second Report presented by the SpanishState on the application of the European Charter
The second report presented to the Secretary General by the SpanishState is dated December 2006, though it was not made available to be read on the website of the Council of Europe until several months later[12]. Later a detailed annex[13] was incorporated by the Basque Government (The Basque Language in the Basque Autonomous Community - Additional information for the Committee of Experts) dated in Vitòria - Gasteiz in September 2007, but on account of its specificity we will not address it.
In this second report, once again we find we are faced with a document which is only partly elaborated, which is shaped by the conjunction of hardly comparable information and data, from heterogeneous sources which vary in detail and level of analysis, which gives what we regard as a distorted view of the linguistic reality of the Spanish State, and which makes it well nigh impossible to assess the changes in the level of compliance with the European Charter. In this second report: