A mission of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee has visited Catalonia to investigate the immersion model in Catalan primary and secondary schools.
The Catalan National Assembly has forwarded a letter to all the members of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee and to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to denounce the instrumentalization of the EU regarding Spanish domestic politics, in relation to the mission investigating the Catalan immersion model and looking into the alleged discrimination of Spanish in schools.
The Catalan immersion is a model of success that has been applied since 1983 and that has been praised by many experts, including the UNESCO. Catalan, a protected language, must be the object of every attention by Spanish authorities. Its use should be encouraged and protected, as noted on different occasions by the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, who recently expressed his concern on the judicial attacks against the use of Catalan in education.
In the missive, Assemblea remarks that education is not a competence of the European Union and that the motive behind this fact-finding mission is to attack the principle of non-discrimination and the linguistic rights of the Catalan speakers.
In this sense, Dolors Feliu has denounced that “the instrumentalization of European Union institutions such as that of the Petitions Committee sets a dangerous precedent as it questions its impartiality, especially when used as a tool against the rights of a national minority”.
A plural, democratic Europe should respect linguistic diversity and national minority languages, and there should be no space for such serious and disproportionate attacks on the principle of non-discrimination based on language.