29.01.2014 - 17:06
A group comprised of members of the European Parliament and representatives of the Platforma per la Llengua have asked the European Commission to act to prevent language discrimination. They ask that such discrimination be considered as serious as the discrimination against sexual orientation, religion, and ethnic origin. Ramon Tremosa, Salvador Sedó, Maria Badia, Raimon Obiols, Raül Romeva, Izaskun Bilbao, Iñaki Irazabalbeitia and the president of the intergroup on Minorities and Languages, the Hungarian Socialist Czaba Tabajdi, have demanded that EU legislation adopt ‘measures to combat’ attacks on language.
The director of the Plataforma per la Llengua, Daniel Mundet, presented a report with forty cases of language discrimination to the representatives of the EU leadership, in particular by the public administration. ‘This cannot be allowed in a state which is considered democratic; there are too many cases for this to be just anecdotal,’ he complained. In twenty-five of these cases, there are security force agents invovled: of the Spanish police and the Civil Guard. ‘It is a clear that there is an attitude that is particularly insensitive to citizens by agents who in theory should be serving those citizens, who impose the Spanish language and often bring legal proceedings or even physical aggression against those citizens,’ said Mundet.
Tremosa, Sedó, Badia, Obiols, Romeva, Bilbao, Irazabalbeitia and Tabadji have sent a complaint to the European Commissioner of Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, and to that of Education, Culture, Multilinguism and Youth, Androulla Vassiliou. The MEPs consider it dysfunctional that ‘the EU legislation prohibits and combats discrimination for sexual orientation, religion, and ethnic origin, but not in the cases in which citizens are discriminated against for their language.’ And they denounce that ‘unfortunately, in some member states, there is a systematic policy of language discrimination whicih requires a legal response at a European level.’
Romeva was very frank: ‘We are asking Commissioner Reding —Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship—to stop saying that this is an internal matter. People rely on Europe as a project that serves to protect its rights. It’s frustrating to have to spend ten years working for Catalan to be an official language in the European institutions and not have been successful. And I can tell that that makes many people stop trusting the European project… It’s a question of human rights, but it’s also the same idea as for the European Union. The EU cannot stop being the guarantor of human rights.’
The MEPs and the Plataforma per la Llengua propose modifying the directive 2000/78/EC from November 2000 on equality of treatment in the labor market in order to disallow discrimination of a worker or candidate in a job interview because of the language they speak. They also want to include language in the proposal for a European directive that ‘implements the principle of equal treatment among people irrespective of their religion or beliefs, capacities, age, or sexual orientation.’ In addition, they ask Reding and Vassiliou that they articulate a specific directive on non-discriminatory language policy, based on Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The director of the Plataforma per la Llengua has accused the Spanish State of ‘not acting strongly enough’ against the aggressions, and it criticized it as a ‘lack of sensitivity’ and assured that ‘it wants the Catalan language to have the same recognition and rights of equality as Spanish’.
