More Castilian in a Maresme school group: the TSJC uses the ECHR's 25% ruling for the first time

BarcelonaFirst ruling in Catalonia justified by the European Court of Justice's decision on linguistic immersion. If in June the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) dismissed the lawsuit by families from the Turó del Drac school in Canet de Mar against the 25% of Spanish, now another school in Maresme is affected by this same decision. The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has used the Strasbourg decision for the first time among its arguments to resolve a dispute about the language of instruction, and has done so to rule in favor of a family from the Institut Escola El Pi Gros in Sant Cebrià de Vallalta, who were requesting more hours of Castilian Spanish.

The sentence does not modify the school's linguistic project, even though the family that filed the lawsuit asked for it to be annulled. However, as the TSJC had already done in other appeals affecting schools in different regions, it recognizes the right of the student involved to take another subject in Spanish, in addition to the Spanish language subject. In practice, this will mean that the educational center will have to offer more subjects in Spanish to the class group of the daughter of the family that took the case to court, but not in the rest of the groups.

The student's family's appeal also requested that the school be required to duplicate all signage in Catalan and Spanish, a matter on which the Supreme Court ruled just two weeks ago. Specifically, a ruling from the high court prohibited the exclusion of Spanish from the signage of public educational centers. Now the TSJC states that the Supreme Court's doctrine would be "fully applicable" in the case of the Sant Cebrià de Vallalta school, even though the magistrates finally dismiss this claim for a procedural reason.

"A way to impose more Spanish"

Plataforma per la Llengua has appeared as a co-defendant in this proceeding and has opposed the request of the student's family, as did the Advocacy of the Generalitat. Once the sentence has been made public, the entity has criticized the TSJC's decision and has announced that it will appeal it to prevent the 25% of Spanish from being applied in this school.

It also lamented the fact that the ruling is based on the ECHR ruling, as it means opening "a new avenue to impose more Spanish in educational centers", with a judicial decision that has arrived before the Constitutional Court (TC) has ruled on the 25% of Spanish in classrooms. Furthermore, the entity referred to the Supreme Court's ruling on signage, and has called on the Government to undertake "all legal actions at its disposal" to request its annulment. Plataforma per la Llengua also warns that, even if in this case it is not applied for a procedural reason, the TSJC's ruling "considers good" the Supreme Court's decision and "adopts the arguments" of the ruling on signage.