The Constitutional Court will not rule on Catalan this year

Barcelona / MadridLast week, Catalan marked the day of September 11th not only because it has become a consensus demand of the majority of the forces in the Parliament, but also because the day before, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) annulled the decree on the language regime that Pere Aragonès' government passed to prevent the application of the castle. A resolution that the Government has already announced it will appeal and that put pro-language parties and organizations on a war footing. However, the issue will not emerge from the limbo in which it finds itself in any short period of time, since this entire debate is pending, in reality, on what the Constitutional Court (TC) decides on both norms (a law and a decree law). They came out ahead in 2022 to try to protect the linguistic immersion model and from which the decree overturned by the TSJC was derived.

According to sources from the TC consulted by ARA, the forecast is that this issue will not be resolved before the end of the year. It has been pending a response since July 2022, when the TSJC itself, in view of the new regulations of the Parliament, raised a question of unconstitutionality claiming that it clashed with the Constitution and the Statute. "We have not considered this matter from the point of view of chronology," assure sources from the court, making it clear that at the moment it is not at the queue of issues that must be resolved before 2026, unlike other matters such as the amnesty law or housing regulations, which do have a provision. In the case of the amnesty, next week's plenary session is expected to resolve the last-minute challenges to the judges filed by former President Carles Puigdemont, while in early October they are expected to rule on the admission of his appeal for protection against the Supreme Court.

The crux of the matter

In any case, the sources consulted make it clear that the position expressed by the High Court of Justice (TSJC) does not affect the ruling that the Constitutional Court must issue, which only applies to legal provisions (not decrees, as was the case with those regulating the language regime). What the Constitutional Court must determine, on the one hand, is whether it is constitutional and statutory for Catalan to remain the vehicular language and for Spanish to be "curricular" based on sociolinguistic reality (as incorporated by the law with the support of the PSC, Junts, ERC, and Comuns); on the other hand, it must decide whether the decree-law that established "the non-application of numerical parameters, proportions, or percentages in the teaching and use of languages" complies with the Constitution. That is, it explicitly prohibits the 25% limit set by the High Court of Justice (TSJC), which was approved by Junts, Esquerra, and Comuns (the PSC was not present in this case).

Court sources assure that they have not addressed the issue, and therefore, it is uncertain how the resolution will progress. However, organizations working to defend language immersion do fear a setback. This is especially true regarding the decree explicitly rejecting percentages. for a matter of form.

The origin of the conflict in the courts

The members of the Constitutional Court, now with a progressive majority, will ultimately decide how to translate into reality the jurisprudence they themselves established following the 2010 ruling on the Statute of Autonomy (Estatut de la Statute). This ruling has been dragging on in the ordinary courts for years, as organizations opposed to immersion were called in to demand that classes be offered.

What did the Constitutional Court's ruling say about the Statute of Autonomy? Although the statutory text explicitly established that the teaching language was Catalan, the Constitutional Court ruled it unconstitutional, considering that it left out Spanish as an official language. In its ruling, the Constitutional Court considered that "nothing prevents" Catalan from being the teaching language, but also added that it is not permitted to be so exclusively. "Nothing prevents the Statute from recognizing the right to receive education in Catalan and for it to be the vehicular and learning language at all levels of education. But nothing prevents Spanish from not being the object of the same right or enjoying, like Catalan, the status of vehicular language of education," it stated explicitly.

Anti-immersion organizations demanded that this be put into practice in schools, and the TSJC ended up establishing that the percentage of Spanish should be 25%, since the Parliament of Catalonia never legislatively specified that Spanish should also be the vehicular language. The most explicit step taken to try to comply with this ruling and at the same time protect the language immersion system is the law now awaiting resolution in the Constitutional Court, agreed upon by the PSC, Junts, ERC, and Comuns, which for the first time defined Spanish as a "curricular" language and opened the door to its use for uniform use throughout the country.