Plataforma per la Llengua took part in the General Assembly of the European Language Equality Network (ELEN) in Bilbao (Bilbo, in Basque) this weekend, which managed to unanimously approve a resolution urging the Spanish government to suspend the imposition of 25% teaching in Spanish in Catalan schools. The resolution, promoted by the organisation, asks Spain to fully comply with the commitments of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), and calls on all institutions to protect and strengthen the language immersion system.
The text, presented to the General Assembly by Plataforma's International Coordinator, Marga Payola, considers that the judicial decisions against language immersion in Catalan are a cause for concern and deplores the fact that organisations defending Catalan have been excluded from judicial proceedings while the participation of entities defending Spanish has been allowed. This partisanship, as recalled in the text approved in Bilbao, has also been seen in the decisions of the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, chaired until a few months ago by Dolors Montserrat of the Spanish Partido Popular. She promoted the theses of anti-immersion Spanish nationalists, with a Public Hearing that included four partial and partisan contributions, a mission with MEPs to meet, above all, opponents of the Catalan school teaching model, and a report with misleading arguments against language immersion.
The ELEN General Assembly maintained that immersion is a vital tool to promote language equality and social cohesion in Catalonia, and that without this system many children from Spanish-speaking environments would not learn Catalan properly. The international organisation also recalled that both the UN special rapporteur on minority issues and the ECRML Committee of Experts have already expressed concern about the court rulings against immersion, and that the Committee of Experts confirmed this September that Spain continues to breach various commitments of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. For this reason, the European network is also demanding that Spain comply with all the commitments it signed up to in 2001, when it ratified CELROM.
ELEN General Assembly
The European Language Equality Network (ELEN) is a non-profit European network whose aim is to promote, protect and ensure the welfare of the least spoken European languages. It works for the linguistic equality of these languages in the context of upholding human rights. ELEN intends to be the voice of the speakers of these languages and has 174 member organisations representing 50 languages from 25 different European States.
In this General Assembly, which started on Friday 8 November and lasted until Sunday, the host organisation was Kontseilua, an organisation defending the Basque language twinned with Plataforma per la Llengua. During the three days it met, in addition to the vote of the General Assembly, presentations were organised to study the situation of the Basque language and learn about good practices to increase its social use. There were also presentations on gender and language usage, digitisation and minority languages, and new tools for interpreting demo-linguistic data.
