The European institutions have begun to examine Spain’s request for Catalan, Basque and Galician to become official languages ??of the European Union (EU), a process that could take years to achieve full status, as has already happened. to Gaelic. “The Council has received a letter from the Spanish government and will examine it,” a European source said on Thursday. The letter from the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, requests the Council, the institution that represents the EU countries and that Spain is chairing during this semester, to include this issue on the agenda of the next General Affairs Council, a meeting that brings together the heads of European Affairs of the Member States and will be held in Brussels on September 19.
It is still not clear at what point the request for that meeting on September 19 will arrive: if that day it would be the subject of a first political debate between the ministers or a vote would already take place. The final vote must be passed unanimously. Converting Catalan, Basque and Galician into official languages ??of the European Union would mean translating into these languages ??not only the treaties and all documentation and legislation produced from now on, but also the entire heritage of the last 65 years of the European project , from directives to sanctions through regulations or inter-institutional agreements.
The vast majority of the 24 official languages ??in the European Union are so through the entry of their Member State into the community club: it was the case of Spanish in 1986, English in 1973 or French, German, Italian and Dutch since the foundation of the then European Economic Community (predecessor of the current EU) in 1958. It is in that year when the regulation that contains all the official languages ??of the European Union is approved and that has been amended every time a country became in partner and your main language, in official for Brussels.
The notable exception to this rule is the case of Gaelic, which with Ireland’s accession to the European Union in 1973 became a treaty language rather than an official language: this meant that only treaties and no other Community documents or legislation they were then translated into Gaelic. In 2005, Ireland applied for Gaelic to gain official language status, which was approved in 2007. However, as there was a limited number of Gaelic translators and technological resources, it was decided that not all documents would be translated into Gaelic. moment with a special temporary derogation expiring in 2022. This derogation began to be withdrawn in 2015 at the request of Ireland as Gaelic translation capacity in community bodies has increased and since 2022, 17 years after Dublin asked to convert it in official language, it is a language with full status before the European institutions.
In 2022, the Spanish Government sent a request to the European Parliament so that Catalan, Basque and Galician could be used in plenary sessions of the institution, a request for which the Bureau of the European Parliament has been waiting months for a report from the parliamentary services on the implications it would have for their day-to-day activities, from translation and interpretation departments to infrastructure or finance departments. The process to convert these three languages ??into official languages ??of the EU has nothing to do with the one open in the European Parliament and goes beyond what Madrid requested in 2022. The European Parliament does not rule on whether or not a language should be official in the EU, since that competence falls entirely on the Council (the countries).
In 2005, the then President of the Spanish Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, sent a letter to the European institutions offering to sign agreements so that the Spanish co-official languages ??could be used, including Valencian as well. They were then achieved in all institutions, except Parliament, where the petition created “a very strong political discussion” -according to sources from the Eurochamber – and the Parliamentary Board, with a majority of popular and liberal members, dealt with it at least three times with Josep Borrell as president of the institution pushing for the yes. There was then a Spaniard on the Board, the popular Alejo Vidal-Quadras, who launched a campaign against it and prevented it from being approved by a narrow margin, recall parliamentary sources.
The European Parliament argued that it was the year after the largest enlargement of the European Union to date and that it was having problems offering interpretation to the new languages ??that were official. Yes, the right of citizens to communicate in these languages ??was recognized in writing and it was planned to review the decision the following year, something that was never done.