April 2006

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THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTES AGAINST GALICIAN, BASQUE AND CATALAN LANGUAGES

April 2006 – The European Parliament refused again the possibility to allow its deputies and citizens to speak and address such institution in Galician, Basque and Catalan. The board of the Parliament, composed of the president, the socialist Josep Borrell, and the vice-presidents -one of whom is the Catalan conservative Aleix Vidal-Quadras, whose vote broke the tie- so decided for seven votes to six. The European Parliament is the only European representative body that still has not approved the use of the co-official languages of Spain once the Spanish state and the European Council signed an administrative arrangement in June 2005 that gave permission to Spain for negotiations with each European institutions to include the use of Galician, Basque and Catalan.

Most of Catalan parliamentarians accuse Vidal-Quadras, member of the European Popular Party, of preventing the use of those languages in the house. The Catalan and the Spanish governments have commented on the possibility to appeal the decision at the European Court of Justice and to solve the dispute in the European Council.

The voting was held one day before a delegation from Northern Catalonia (French Catalonia) demanded the European Parliament that Catalan language in France be given official status. The ten members of the Federation for the Protection of the Catalan Language and Culture in Northern Catalonia met with Intergroup MEP’s, a body promoting traditional national minorities, constitutional regions and regional languages presided by the Hungarian Csaba Tabajdi, and handed them a document entitled “No to language discrimination in Northern Catalonia”. They also asked the European institutions to call upon France to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and to recognise Catalan within its territory.