The judicialization of language, a dead end

Catalan language advocacy organizations, led by Òmnium and Platform for the Language, are preparing for a ruling by the Constitutional Court (CC) that would dismantle the legal response constructed during the previous term, with broad consensus, to prevent the imposition of a 25% quota for Spanish in schools. In 2022, during the Aragonese government, a decree-law was passed that prevented the application of language percentages in education (under the pro-independence majority at the time). A law, which in this case also received the support of the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the Comuns (Comuns), established Catalan as the vehicular language and established the use of official languages in education. The law appears likely to pass the Constitutional Court, but not the decree-law, which was more explicit in rejecting the 25% quota and could give the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) the opportunity to continue its offensive.

The underlying problem is precisely this: a justice system that has long since become a political actor, even intervening in the kitchen of technical government decisions. It's one thing to generically advocate that all boys and girls should know Catalan and Spanish—a fact, incidentally, that responds to the spirit of the Statute and the Constitution—and quite another to specify, far from scientific pedagogical criteria, how to do this in the classroom.

The language immersion system, as has been demonstrated by two generations of students, has guaranteed the learning of both Catalan and Spanish; and if it has been lacking in any way, it has been precisely in Catalan, which is suffering a sustained decline in its social use, especially among young people. In fact, the language immersion system was conceived at the beginning of democracy and self-government to correct the historical anomaly of the prohibition and marginalization of Catalan. On the one hand, it has been applied with great flexibility. And, on the other hand, the fact that Catalan is once again at a disadvantage should make everyone reflect. Justice, too. Justice cannot act outside the reality of the society it is meant to serve. And, in this case, the imposition of 25% Spanish, apart from its technical impossibility and the danger of social division it could introduce in the educational world, would represent a new obstacle to the normalization of Catalan, which is the language that needs the greatest support and protection.

In any case, in the event of a ruling by the Constitutional Court overturning the decree-law, if the High Court of Justice (TSJC) does indeed take advantage of it to renew its fight and interfere in school life, both the government and Catalan civil society will have to make clear their commitment to the right of all children to full knowledge of the Catalan language, which they must not renounce, and which defending it would be contrary to Spanish. The judicialization of the language has long since become a dead end that, far from providing solutions, has only complicated matters.