[Catalan version here]
Plataforma per la Llengua denounces that the draft report, prepared by the Committee on Petitions of the European Parliament following the visit of MEPs to evaluate language immersion, adopts the views of Spanish nationalism. The report also makes unilateral recommendations to the authorities to increase the use of Spanish in schools. Plataforma per la Llengua would point out that the European Commission is not authorised, as the institution itself has reiterated on three occasions, to intervene in this case. The language used in education is the exclusive competence of Spain (transferred to the Generalitat de Catalunya). It regrets that the visit of the MEPs has served to spread lies and specious arguments, with the use of public resources, against Catalan-language schools.
️ The MEPs of the @EP_Petitions committee chaired by @DolorsMM who evaluated Catalan immersion system make the Spanish thesis their own.
⁰Misleading claims and half-truths are the basis of their arguments.
⁰We untangle them in the thread below https://t.co/zXbAdYByGG— Plataforma per la Llengua - Europa (@llenguacatEU)
The draft report of this committee, chaired by Dolors Montserrat, includes the arguments of the different social agents with whom the MEPs met between the 18th and 20th of December to evaluate language immersion in situ. However, given the biased choice of interlocutors, it served to promote the positions of the pro-Spanish organisations that are clearly opposed to the normalisation of the Catalan language. Regarding the meetings with interlocutors who defended language immersion, the report ignores some of the key points that said agents passed on to them. Based on the arguments of those opposed to language immersion, the Committee on Petitions subsequently made a series of recommendations to the institutions that are worrying. This is not because of the path they may take, but because they protect and endorse the lies told by these entities.
Among its recommendations, the Committee on Petitions urges the Spanish government to monitor whether "a balanced language curriculum" and "equal treatment of the co-official languages" are being respected in Catalonia. It also urges the Spanish government to review the monitoring carried out by the Alta Inspecció Educativa (the body appointed by the Spanish government to ensure compliance with the educational law) to make sure that this is the case. In the text, the Commission misrepresents the law and claims that the right to be taught in Spanish is enshrined in Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution. The Commission claims that, although there may be other official languages in specific territories, Spanish must be given "equal treatment" to these languages in the education system. The reality is, however, that it is false that the Constitution demands this equal treatment. In fact, the Constitutional Court's ruling 337/1994 states that it is legitimate for Catalan to be the focus of the educational model, as long as this does not mean the exclusion of Spanish as a teaching language.
In addition, the Commission also calls on the Generalitat to establish a "constructive dialogue" with families who have taken legal action against immersion. The Commission is concerned that the Generalitat "will not apply" the Catalan High Court's ruling imposing a minimum of 25% of Spanish in schools. In this sense, the Commission also regrets that the complainant families suffer "social exclusion", "intimidation" or "bullying" for having taken legal action and that they have been "victims of hate speech", calling on the Generalitat to monitor this closely. As for the European Commission, it asks it to monitor the application in Catalonia of Article 165 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (which sets out obligations in the field of education). It also asks it to ensure that the Generalitat "has respect for cultural and linguistic diversity".
Lastly, the draft also incorporates a request addressed to the administrations to ensure that families of students with special educational needs can send their children to school to be taught in their mother tongue. Moreover, it calls for changes in legislation and administrative measures to force all schools to communicate systematically in both Catalan and Spanish with their families. Although until now those who requested it could also receive communications in Spanish, the Committee on Petitions proposes to change the LEC (the Educational Law of Catalunya), endorsed by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), and any other applicable regulations so that Spanish is also incorporated by default. In addition, the Commission asks to send the report not only to the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Spanish government, and the TSJC but also to the Constitutional Court "while awaiting the sentence". The Constitutional Court must rule whether the law promoted by the Generalitat to circumvent the obligation of 25% of Spanish in the classroom is constitutional.
For Plataforma per la Llengua, it is clear that the commission chaired by Dolors Montserrat has once again made partisan use of public resources to attack Catalan speakers. The aim of the MEPs' visit was only to generate discourse against the language immersion system, and in no case to get a close look at the system's characteristics. Moreover, for the organisation, it is a very serious matter that the Committee on Petitions is trying to put pressure on the Constitutional Court to rule against language immersion by sending the report on the MEPs' visit.
The social democratic group, formed by the Greens and the Left, boycotted the visit. The only MEPs who took part in this visit were essentially right-wing or extreme right-wing MEPs who were already hostile to the normalisation of the Catalan language. In this sense, the choice of the organisations they met also showed a lack of interest in learning about the reality of the system. Many entities were parapolitical groups that were not representative of Catalan society and had been chosen because of their links with pro-Spanish political parties. In terms of visits to schools, they only visited one secondary school and one special education centre. These centres do not technically apply the system of linguistic immersion, because immersion is a specific learning methodology for infant and primary school. Although in secondary school, colloquially, the word may be used to refer to the fact that classes are taught in Catalan. In any case, they did not care too much about what the system wanted to achieve. In the conclusions of this draft report, they state that "the educational model is effectively monolingual, which is contrary to the objective that the immersion model should be bilingual". An objective that is nowhere stated and which is a contradiction in itself.
Lies and misleading arguments against immersion, the basis for the report
In order to make these recommendations in the draft, the Committee on Petitions adopted in the report the arguments and lies presented by the Spanish nationalist organisations with which the MEPs met. The first meeting was with Ana Losada and Jordi López, who asked the commission, chaired by Dolors Montserrat, for protection to study in Spanish in Catalonia. What stands out from their meeting is that Losada stated that "students whose first language is Spanish are more likely to fail because their language is not welcome in the school". This misleading statement ignores the socio-economic background of students and establishes a non-existent causal relationship of educational outcomes with the first language. Losada, who is president of the extremist group Asamblea por una Escuela Bilingüe, a member of Impulso Ciudadano, and who was on the PP list in 2011 in Hospitalet de Llobregat, also stressed that students "lose the right to study in Spanish", a right enshrined, according to her, in the STJ 31/2010, a ruling that says that Spanish cannot be excluded from the system. As for López, he was a Ciudadanos councillor in El Prat de Llobregat from 2019 to 2023 and was their candidate for mayor in 2023.
As for the second meeting, held with parents "affected by the language immersion model", the version of three specific parents is accepted, although it does not correspond to the experience of the majority of families in Catalan schools. These three parents not only gave a biased view of the facts to MEPs, but also made false claims such as that "the Generalitat does not know what the mother tongue of students is". The reality is that the Consell Superior d'Avaluació del Sistema Educatiu (Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Education System)has published quite a few studies on the subject. Moreover, these parents, selected from among all the parents in Catalonia, also stated that Catalan nationalism "wants to achieve independence in the next generation and language is the key to indoctrination". Going on to say that "the authorities want to eradicate Spanish from public life", political assessments which are in line with the views of Dolors Montserrat. In this sense, it is revealing that to know the opinion of families in Catalonia on immersion, the MEPs did not speak, for example, with the AFFAC, the association that represents the majority of the country's associations of students' families. Probably because it would not have given them what they wanted to hear.
Regarding the meeting with the trade union USTEC, a member of the Somescola platform of which Plataforma per la Llengua is a member, the report does not mention the document that was handed over to the MEPs with arguments in favour of immersion drawn up by the more than sixty organisations that are part of it. Furthermore, although reference is made to the December response of the UN Special Rapporteur on Minorities in which he expressed concern about the situation of Catalan in schools, there is no mention of a crucial aspect that the union's spokesperson, Iolanda Segura, explained to them. The fact that the Rapporteur asked Spain to review the rulings that impose a minimum of 25% of Spanish in schools, so as not to reduce the amount of time of exposure to Catalan and to allow everyone to learn the language of the country.
Serious statements made by the president of the TSJC, Jesús María Barrientos, who considers that the complainant families are victims of "xenophobia" and suffer "harassment"
As for the meeting with members of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), the draft report notes that the president, Jesús María Barrientos, explained to MEPs that "since 1994 there have been conflicts concerning the language immersion model as well as countless calls from parents who wanted a greater presence of Spanish in education". Bearing in mind that in all these years, around fifty schools have been affected by these appeals, and that there are around 5,000 schools in Catalonia, the percentage of schools affected is residual. It is evident that the appeals have not been "innumerable".
For Barrientos, as the report continues, the legal action taken by parents to achieve a "reasonable percentage" of Spanish in their children's class has created "great social conflict and protests in the courts, but also harassment of parents and students alike. They are told to leave, to adapt or to be ignored". In this sense, the text produced by the Committee on Petitions states that, for Barrientos, behind these events "there is xenophobia", and "families who exercise their rights have problems due to harassment". For Plataforma per la Llengua, it is unacceptable that the president of the TSJC should make such unbiased statements.
Of the meeting with Docentes Libres (Free Teachers), whose representation is minimal and, therefore, whose legitimacy to speak on behalf of Catalan teachers is highly questionable, the report highlights that the representatives express that immersion goes against the "fundamental rights of teachers". Many of them consider the plan to promote the use of Catalan to be "a daily threat and a permanent source of stress and personal uncertainty". The statements made by both representatives, one of whom is Sonia Sierra, a former Ciudadanos MP, are serious if we take into account that they are public workers and should therefore use Catalan as a priority in their interactions (as established in Article 13 of the LEC). But they are easily explained if we take into account that the association itself says that it fights for the fundamental rights of teachers. "Teachers who suffer the nationalist policies of the Catalan governments and their political use of schools and education". Moreover, as the draft report explains, they argue that "Catalan is not a minority language" and "is not at risk". However, they go on to say that only 36% of Catalans identify themselves as Catalan speakers, a fact that calls into question whether they know what the word means in sociolinguistic terms. Finally, the report states that, according to Docentes Libres, there is "not a single piece of data to support the success of immersion", a statement that ignores the fact that, among the many documents that support it, there is even one from the United Nations and that, according to the UN rapporteur on minorities, the model has been highly praised historically and is in line with international treaties.
The bias of the mission's MEPs
The bias is also evident in the very questions and assessments that the draft report collects from MEPs. The German Peter Jahr, of the European People's Party, for example, believes that "as both languages are co-official, both should be used as a vehicle, and although Catalan should be privileged, Spanish cannot be excluded from them". Jahr himself concludes that "the problem is the lack of cooperation from the Catalan administration, interference in judicial affairs, and problems with the separation of powers". Of the meeting with Councillor Anna Simó, the Commission's report notes that, after Simó's explanations, Jahr insisted that "he did not understand the refusal to teach more hours in Spanish". Moreover, after speaking with the Catalan Ombudsman for grievances, Esther Giménez-Salinas, he says that "minorities are not taken into consideration, which is not democratically acceptable, because minorities should be protected from discrimination". The irony of the phrase, which other interlocutors express similarly at different times during the visits, is that it refers to Spanish speakers, and not to Catalan speakers, as the minority that is being discriminated against, as Plataforma per la Llengua's periodic reports attest.
From the conversation with MEPs and USTEC, the document notes that Polish MEP Kosma Zlotowski, from far-right party Vox's own political group in the European Parliament, said that, for him, the current education system is a clear model of one language dominating another. Zlotowski further commented that the current education system is, for him, a clear model of one language dominating another". The forcefulness of the statement, which considers Spanish to be the subjugated language, is surprising if one considers that he has no knowledge of the case. He made this assertion only by listening to the statements made by the petitioners and the three parents. It is evident that the MEPs came with a clear idea of what they wanted to hear. In the case of the meeting with the Catalan Ombudsman, both she and her deputy, Jaume Saura, stressed that they had not received many complaints concerning language in schools. The interventions of the MEPs in the report of the Committee on Petitions show that they do not care about the reality of the situation.
In addition to Jarh and Zlotowski, the group of MEPs was completed by Jana Toom, who shares a group in the European Parliament with Ciudadanos, and Maria Angela Danzì of the Five Star Movement. These representatives were accompanied by a delegation made up of Dolors Montserrat herself, and three other pro-Spanish MEPs (Rosa Estaràs, from the PP; Maite Pagazaurtundúa, from the Ciudadanos group in the European Parliament; and Jorge Buxadé, from Vox). The only companion in favour of the normalisation of Catalan was Diana Riba, from Esquerra Republicana.
