European Language Equality Network calls on the EU to levy sanctions against discrimination towards Catalan
ELEN Secretary-General warns that EU support for minority languages “has dropped off in the last decade”
The European Language Equality Network (ELEN) calls on the EU to levy “sanctions” on states that allow language discrimination. During an interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the approval of the European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML), ELEN Secretary-General, Davyth Hicks, stated that the EU should sanction a state “when someone is arrested or beaten for using the official language in the country, as happens in many cases with Catalan". “We want the EU to be more active,” complained Hicks, “The EU has always been very supportive in a soft way, but this support has dropped off in the last decade.”
The Council of Europe approved the ECRML in 1992. However, coinciding with its 25th anniversary, a recent report of the European Parliament admitted that “the current complex political and economic situation in the EU does not favor such efforts” regarding languages. One of the main goals of ELEN is to reverse this trend.
The latest concern of this organization, which defends linguistic equality and the protection and promotion of less-spoken European languages, was the refusal of the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, to allow MEPs to speak in non-official languages on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the ECRML. Some of those MEPs disobeyed Tajani’s decision and, following the initiative proposed by the Intergroup of Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages of the European Parliament, they made their remarks in their mother tongues, some of them in Catalan.