May 2005

<<back

print>>

LANGUAGE INTERGROUP BACKS BID FOR EU OFFICIAL STATUS FOR CATALAN, BASQUE AND GALICIAN (Eurolang)

May 2005 – Language Intergroup leader Csaba Tabajdi MEP met with European Parliament (EP) President Josep Borrell to deliver the group’s unanimous declaration calling for Catalan, Basque and Galician to be used in the EP’s plenary sessions.

The declaration focuses in Catalan language and describes the legal framework of this language at state-level. It also stresses that “the respect for linguistic diversity is one of the democratic and cultural bases of the Union”, as outlined in Article 22 of the Charter of the Fundamental Laws of the European Union ("The Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity"). In accordance with all these, the declaration sets that a language can not be discriminated just because it is not spoken in the whole of a State.

The declaration also states that: “The Catalan language can be used in the plenary by the European Parliamentarians that wish it. In order to facilitate the task of interpretation, however, the parliamentarians who wish to speak in Catalan at plenary will warn the interpreters services the day before of its wish of intervening in that language so as to guarantee that there is an interpreter in the cabin of Spanish interpretation who can translate Catalan to Spanish or any other official language.”

Finally, the declaration also refers to other languages than Catalan: the possibility of using the Catalan in the EP Plenary sessions should be extended to the other two co-official languages of the Spanish State that are the Euskera and Gallego, eventually requiring the previous delivery of the intervention in writing in any official EU language.