June 2004

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EU’S LANGUAGE REGIME UNSATISFACTORILY IMPROVED

June 2004 – The expectations laid upon the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) of 17-18 June as regards the possible recognition of Basque, Galician and Catalan and eventually other non-state languages as EU Constitution’s languages have been finally frustrated. Instead, the EU Heads of State or Government have solely agreed to allow the possibility of producing official translations of the constitutional treaty “into any other languages as determined by Member States among those which, in accordance with their constitutional order, enjoy official status in all or part of their territory”. Thus will be the wording of a second paragraph which has been added to Article IV-10. Further to this new paragraph a very general declaration has been included in the Final Act of the Conference explaining that this paragraph “contributes to fulfilling the objective of respecting the Union's rich cultural and linguistic diversity as set forth in paragraph 3 of Article I-3 of the Treaty” and that the Union will continue to pay “special attention (…) to these and other languages”. Moreover, it is stated that those Member States wishing to provide a translation should “communicate to the Council, within six months from the date of the signature of the Treaty, the language or languages into which translations of the Treaty will be made.” Therefore, non-state languages will not be given ‘treaty language status’ but only ‘translation status’, which means that language rights have been restricted inasmuch as the translation of the Constitution into non-state languages will not be authentic and the speakers of these languages will not be allowed to exercise the petition right in their mother tongue. Such meagre outcome may be due to several factors: the weak political pressure made by the Spanish Government, the reluctance shown by the Irish Presidency and even by some states –such as France–, the short time available for the negotiations, or perhaps all at once. (See Mercator-Legislation News: April and May 2004).