Plataforma per la Llengua, together with other entities, met with the Committee of Experts of the Council of Europe. This is the committee that evaluates the fulfilment of the commitments made by Spain in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) during the period 2017-2021. The meetings were devoted to compliance with the Charter regarding Catalan in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

Prior to the meetings, Plataforma per la Llengua and eleven other Catalan language organisations submitted a fifty-page report containing a technical analysis of the implementation of the commitments in areas such as education, justice, public administration, the media, and cultural promotion.

The meeting with the Committee of Experts is held every five years to verify that the Spanish State complies with the commitments of the ECRML, which it ratified in 2001 (and which it has never fulfilled).

Education: the right to study in Catalan, under threat in Catalonia and Valencia

In the meetings held with the ECRML's Committee of Experts, Catalan language organisations were  able to present the decline in the use of Catalan in Catalan schools. They also discussed the impact that the generalised application of a 25% compulsory use of Spanish, imposed by court rulings, could have. The experts have shown interest in the situation that could arise after this ruling.

In the meeting concerning Catalan in Valencia, they also discussed the threat posed by the educational model announced by the Valencian government in the hands of PP (Spanish nationalist conservative right) and VOX (Spanish nationalist far right).

International protection has been requested to guarantee the right to receive judicial documents and notifications in Catalan

The meeting with the Committee of Experts also allowed the advocacy organisations to request the Experts for more help in changing the fact that the current legal framework does not allow for the right to conduct legal proceedings in Catalan. Furthermore, they pointed out that judges are failing to comply with 81.3% of the requests to issue judicial notifications in Catalan, which is a blatant breach of the Charter.

In order to change the situation, the organisations have proposed to the Committee of Experts that the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary and the High Court of Justice of Catalonia be asked to establish a more flexible mechanism to address linguistic discrimination in the justice system. This should include ensuring that illegal requests by judges or public administration lawyers to translate documents from Catalan into Spanish are considered infringements. In addition, the representatives of the organisations also called for Spain to be asked to guarantee that justice workers know Catalan and for said language to be a requirement.

Catalan needs solutions in public administration and health

In the field of public administration, although the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended in 2019 that the use of Catalan in the general administration of the State should be improved with immediate effect, no progress has been made in this area. The lack of language training requirements for workers and the lack of stability in the workforce means that the existing courses are ultimately insufficient to guarantee the right to be attended to in Catalan. In addition, the State has not increased the presence of Catalan on the administration's websites, nor has it begun to require suppliers and tenderers to be able to work in Catalan. It is for this reason that the entities have asked the Experts to ask the State to change these policies.

Specific problems with the Valencian Regional Administration were also discussed in the meeting on Catalan in Valencia. It should be noted that 26.6% of regional officials (41.8% in Alicante) respond in writing in Spanish or require citizens who write to them in Valencian to speak Spanish. With regard to oral attention, 23.4% of civil servants answer orally in Spanish or require citizens to speak in Spanish. All this is in a context in which language training has not been guaranteed. And the legislative changes provided for in the Valencian Civil Service Law, which would have made it compulsory to have a certificate of proficiency in the Valencian language in order to work in the administration, have not been implemented. The organisations have reminded the experts that 31.8% of civil servants claim to know how to speak Valencian only "a little", and 2.8% do not speak it at all.

In the health sector, the use of Catalan with doctors in Catalonia has fallen from 41.2% in 2003 to 26.4% in 2018. In fact, the last report of the Committee of Experts already considered that the Catalan authorities had stopped fully complying with the commitment to guarantee care in Catalan in hospitals. In Valencia, only 13.4% of patients in health centres speak Valencian all the time.

In the Balearic Islands, it should also be noted that the medical studies at the University of the Balearic Islands are very "Spanishised", with 73.9% of the professors teaching exclusively in Spanish, and none teaching exclusively in Catalan. The government's actions have aggravated the situation, with the closure of the Office of Linguistic Rights and the abolition of the regulations requiring training in Catalan in the health sector (although this has not yet been generally applied).

The entities have asked the experts to ask for measures to guarantee the right to be treated in Catalan, even in the context of a lack of doctors. The entities have proposed to be more demanding in terms of language training to hire staff, but also to stabilise them. They have also proposed to mobilise more resources to train healthcare staff who currently have an insufficient level of Catalan, including training in working hours.

We submit the documentation of cases of discrimination by the Spanish police forces

In addition, Plataforma per la Llengua has given the Experts the documentation of 26 cases of linguistic discrimination by the Spanish police forces. Following the latest report of the Committee of Experts, the Spanish government denied having any knowledge of these events, claiming that agents would have been disciplined in such cases, and alleged that these cases were only the version of some NGOs. It also stated that they had never been reported and that "there is no knowledge of these facts beyond partial comments and that such comments do not provide any evidence".

The Spanish State: 23 years in breach of ECRML and a Constitution that imposes the supremacy of the Spanish language

The European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages is a European treaty promoted by the Council of Europe since 1992, which aims to protect the historical languages of Europe that do not have official status, also called regional or minority languages. The Spanish State ratified it in 2001 (France and Italy have never done so), but since then, it has permanently violated it in matters of justice, reciprocity, public administration, and education.

In the case of the Spanish State, despite having ratified ECRML, the Constitution proclaims that Spanish is the only official language of the State as a whole and that the other native languages of the State can only be official in their traditional territories. In addition, the Constitution also establishes a general right to use Spanish and a duty of all citizens to know it: it is not enough to know another of the native languages, so newcomers especially perceive them as redundant. The constant approval of rules that reinforce this artificially created inequality is the result of a supremacist vision of linguistic groups. After all, Spanish is only the traditional and customary language of part of the State's territory, and is by no means a "common language", forcing the other languages into a state of residualisation. This fact, therefore, prevents the State from complying with the ECRML, to which it is a signatory, and at the same time violates part of its own legal framework.