The Government will only ask its European partners to vote on its proposal to include Catalan, Galician and Basque among the official languages of the Union when it has "guarantees" of its approval, explained yesterday the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, before the harsh criticism from Junts and ERC because the initiative is not going to be approved today. “It is the umpteenth scam in Spain,” says Quim Torra.
A key document to take this step and put the proposed reform of the community linguistic regime to a vote in the EU is the report of the Council's legal services, which Spain has already requested. The legal framework of the reform proposed by Spain limits its effects to its co-official languages, explains Albares in the letter sent yesterday to his European colleagues. “From the conversations held” in November “I deduced that for several Member States it was important to have a clear legal framework that established the requirements that a language had to meet to be included in Regulation 1/1958,” reads the letter, to which La Vanguardia has had access, before detailing the five basic conditions that must be met and that only occur in Spain.
“There is an open dialogue with the legal services of the Council to present a solid proposal that can be inserted into the European linguistic framework” and with “guarantees that it can move forward,” explained Albares in Brussels, where yesterday he participated in the meeting of ministers. of Foreign Affairs of the EU and today the General Affairs Council (CAG) meets, the forum where the Spanish proposal has been debated since September, first at the political level and, since last week, in the working groups. Incorporating responses to the comments and criticisms received, the Government intends that “the Spanish proposal of September 19 will one day be the proposal of the Twenty-seven.
Although the provisional agenda of the CAG indicated that the Spanish presidency of the Council proposed a vote on the initiative, on Sunday, during the meeting of ambassadors of the Twenty-seven it was reported that finally today there would only be one discussion on the issue. This decision, highly criticized by the independent movement, which considers that it reveals a lack of will and commitment to the official status of Catalan, responds to “the classic way of functioning that the EU has,” replied Albares, who recalled that Ireland took “more than two years” in achieving recognition of Gaelic as the official language of the Union despite the fact that it was a simpler case, since it already had the status of treaty language.
The reform must be approved unanimously and with a hasty vote, before being certain that all the delegations will support it; far from promoting the initiative, they would make it return to square one. If it were rejected, it would be more complicated to put it back on the Council's agenda since it would be necessary to justify that there are new elements or internal movements that justify it. But the end of the semester of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the EU on December 31 does not mean that the issue will disappear from the agenda, the Government insists, contrary to what the pro-independence parties suspect and diplomatic sources from some European capitals suggest. . When it considers it necessary, Spain will request its inclusion in the CAG agenda from the current presidency.
While Portugal, Romania, Cyprus and Slovakia have expressed their willingness to support the reform, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Latvia, among others, have made their reservations clear from the beginning. Italy has been skeptical. Germany and France, on the other hand, have chosen to let the Government do its thing and limit themselves to requesting that the proposal be thoroughly analyzed from a technical and legal point of view. In general, however, the reception has been much less cold than in 2005 and in some countries in the hard core of Europe there is even "understanding" towards the "favor" that Madrid is asking for, as long as its impact is limited and they make sure that Expanding the number of official languages from 24 to 27 will not slow down the entry into force of the new EU legislation. “It is not on the wrong track,” point out European diplomatic sources.
