September 2004

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THE CATALAN GOVERNMENT FINES SPANISH POST FOR USING ONLY SPANISH

September 2004 — The Department of Trade, Tourism and Consumption of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan government) imposed a sanction of 30,000 Euros to the Spanish post for not having complied with the Catalan Act on language policy of 1998. In accordance with the Catalan government, the huge amount of money to be paid aims at serving as an example to prevent some other public and private companies from not observing the law. The Spanish post did not comply with several articles of the Act, such as the 15, 30, 31 or 32. For instance, article 32 establishes that “permanent signs and posters with general information and documents offering services provided to users and consumers in establishments open to the public shall be at least drawn up in Catalan”. The sanction to this company is the result of over 70 complaints of Catalan citizens denouncing the lack of signage and documents written, at least, in Catalan in the post offices, as set in the law. The complaints to the Spanish post also referred to the substitution of the previous bilingual company sign for the current logo, Correos, only written in Spanish. Nevertheless, the current trademark of the Spanish post cannot be not be penalised since the regulation is not applicable to trademarks, commercial names or to signs protected by industrial property legislation. In spite of this, the Spanish Parliament passed a green paper urging the Spanish government to adopt measures regarding the trademark of the company, since it does not reflect the multilingualism existing in the Spanish territory. In general terms, it is quite significant that since 2003 over 400 language complaints affecting several companies have been submitted to the Catalan administration. Most of these complaints come from citizens and organisations working on the promotion and defence of linguistic rights and the 90% of them refer to the scarce presence of Catalan language in signage, labelling, advertising and general documents offered to the public.