The Diplomat
The European Parliament’s Petitions Committee has called on the Spanish Government and the Generalitat of Catalonia to comply with the court ruling that sets the use of Spanish at 25% in Catalan schools.
The Commission thus endorses the complaint of the Assembly for a Bilingual School Collective, which has warned of the discrimination it believes Spanish-speaking pupils suffer in the Catalan education system, reports Europa Press.
“It is the Spanish authorities who must enforce the ruling. We will send an injunction to the Spanish authorities, that is to say the Government and the Generalitat, so that the sentence is complied with”, the president of Petitions, Dolors Montserrat, stressed yesterday, after the debate sparked by the group’s demand.
The president of the Assembly for a Bilingual School Collective, Ana Losada, denounced in the European Parliament that the Catalan authorities have been violating the linguistic rights of pupils for decades with the immersion system, without the Spanish government having remedied the situation, and asked Europe for the help that the Generalitat is not providing.
A representative of the European Commission pointed out that this is an internal Spanish issue that has to be settled in accordance with the constitutional system, noting that Brussels “has no reason” to believe that the rule of law is not being respected in Spain.
The petition had the support of the right-wing groups; PP, liberals and conservatives. In this sense, the ‘popular’ Rosa Estarás criticised the “imposition” of Catalan in the educational model in Catalonia, warning that it “damages coexistence”.
On behalf of Ciudadanos, Maite Pagazaurtundua warned of the “selective myopia” regarding fundamental values in the Union and, in the same vein, Jordi Cañas regretted that the European Commission is debating “the sex of angels”, calling for a greater role in supervising compliance with the court ruling.
For Hermann Tertsch of Vox, the European Commission’s position is “unprecedented” and he criticised the fact that it is prepared to “mount interference” in the case of Hungary and Poland. He called for a European Parliament mission to visit the country to see the situation at first hand.
The Socialists, whose MEP Javi López ironically said that the request is “preventive” because rights have not been violated in Catalonia as “there is still time to apply the sentence”. “There have been more than 50 rulings and the Catalan authorities have always applied them,” he said, insisting that Brussels does not have competence over education.
According to ERC, the European Parliament becomes a “stage for conjecture and hypotheses” when it discusses complaints such as this one, which are “minimal” in comparison with the entire Catalan education system. “They insist on creating a problem where it does not exist, because it is in the conflict where they believe they can get a few more votes at the expense of coexistence”, Diana Riba criticised the conservative groups.
In the same way, Toni Comin of Junts insisted that only with a school in Catalan can a bilingual society be preserved in Catalonia, and took the opportunity to denounce the fact that this language is not considered an official language in EU institutions.
