The Plataforma per la Llengua is backing "Minority Safepack", a European Citizens' Initiative petitioning the European Union to enact a package of legal measures geared towards guaranteeing the fundamental rights of stateless nations and of the speakers of non-official EU languages, currently numbering 50 million citizens.
This initiative, promoted by the Federation of European Nationalities (FUEN) European network, is proposing, among other measures, the creation of a European centre for linguistic diversity, the approval of a recommendation that establishes the common guidelines to be followed by member states' language policies in order to guarantee the rights of minority languages or the enactment of a Directive that clearly imposes audiovisual signal reciprocity across borders that divide territories where the same languages are spoken. These proposals also enjoy the support of the ELEN (European Language Equality Network) and NPLD (Network for the Promotion of Linguistic Diversity) European networks, both of which the Catalan language NGO is a member.
In accordance with the provisions of the regulations governing the European Citizens' Legislative Initiative, the "Minority Safepack" initiative will have to collect one million signatures from at least seven different member states by April 3, 2018. If this number of signatures is collected, the proposal would be put to the European Commission and to the European Parliament. In this regard, La Plataforma per la Llengua is calling for the signature of this initiative, which would constitute a step forward in Catalan's legal status in the European Union.
Nevertheless, the Catalan language NGO would like to make it clear that it will not stop at the accomplishment of these objectives. Catalan is spoken by 10 million people, it is the fourteenth most-spoken language in the European Union and has more speakers than ten of the twenty-four official languages of the EU. There is no other language with this number of speakers that is not an official EU language. As a result of this totally irregular legal and political situation, la Plataforma per la Llengua's priority objective will continue to be to make Catalan a fully-fledged language in the University European Union, and it will continue to work with this objective in mind.
