The Catalan government will appeal the ruling that annuls a large part of the decree that protects Catalan in the classroom.

BarcelonaAnother judicial blow to Catalan in the classroom. The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has annulled a large part of the decree on the language regime that Pere Aragonès's government approved to protect Catalan as the teaching language in schools and prevent the implementation of language percentages. The law It had been provisionally suspended for over a year pending the court's decision. Now the judges have accepted part of the appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School (AEB) to annul it, and this Wednesday, the president of the Generalitat (Catalan government), Salvador Illa, announced that the government will appeal the decision. "We will not allow anyone to make political use of the language because it is the worst thing that can be done to promote coexistence. Catalan must continue to be the inclusive, unique, and transversal language of the country and the school," he stated. The Platform for the Language, the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), the Association of Jurists for the Republic, and the Osona Association of Lawyers in Defense of Human Rights, all of whom are participating in the proceedings, have also announced that they will file an appeal.

The TSJC (High Court of Justice) has annulled more than a dozen articles of the decree, including those establishing that Catalan and Aranese are the teaching languages in schools, as well as the section stipulating that the habitual language of teachers and communication with families must be Catalan. The ruling was announced just before the Diada (National Day of the People), when the AEB (Spanish Association of Workers) released it, but the judges had already deliberated and voted on their decision on July 15. However, they did not notify the ruling until Monday.

In parallel, the Constitutional Court (TC) has not yet ruled. the question of unconstitutionality that the TSJC itself raised on the double regulation that sought to protect Catalan in schools and institutes and thus avoid the 25% sentence of CastilianIn fact, the decree that now largely annuls the TSJC (High Court of Justice) was based precisely on this regulation, which is in the hands of the high court. Although it has been warned for months that the ruling on language percentages in classrooms could be announced soon. and that would be a setback for CatalanFor now, the Constitutional Court hasn't made any move.

Since this decree was only in force for a month until the courts suspended it, the TSJC's decision will not affect day-to-day classroom operations. Sources from the Department of Education have confirmed that they have received the ruling and that the ministry's legal experts are evaluating it.

The TSJC sees an "imbalance in favor of Catalan"

The judges who annulled most of the sections of the decree on the language regime argue that these do not guarantee "a reasonable presence of Spanish in education" but, on the contrary, create "a situation of imbalance in favor of the Catalan language." For them, this would go so far as to make it impossible "to consider that the guarantee of a balanced teaching of Spanish is respected" so that students can master both languages by the end of compulsory education. They also consider that all the articles of the decree on the language regime they annulled have "a common purpose: to systematically establish that Catalan (and Aranese in Aran) constitutes the language normally used as vehicular and for learning" in the education system, with a "predominant" presence.

The judges reiterate that the autonomous community model "does not completely displace Spanish from the moment its educational and curricular use is planned" to ensure that all students master it by the end of compulsory education. In this sense, they justify that the Constitutional Court's doctrine does not pose any "constitutional obstacle to the autonomous language being the center of gravity of this model of bilingualism," as long as Spanish is not "excluded."

The key problem for the court is that the annulled sections of the decree did not mention Spanish as the vehicular language at any point. "This does not allow us to consider that the adequate presence of Spanish is guaranteed or that there are monitoring and evaluation instruments" for all students to achieve Spanish language proficiency, they conclude.

New appeal and citizen mobilization

Language advocacy organizations have immediately commented on the TSJC's decision. For Ruth Carandell, director of Platform for the Language, the ruling comes as no surprise because "it merely repeats the arguments the TSJC has already made in other rulings," such as the 25% limit in classrooms. "The TSJC had considered itself entitled to regulate the 25% limit for Catalan in classrooms because it criticized the Catalan government for not implementing language regulation in schools. This decree was intended precisely to respond to the TSJC, but, paradoxically, the court itself is now challenging it," Carandell criticized.

With this ruling, "what the TSJC is doing is putting its own jurisprudence back into circulation and forgetting about the new regulatory framework," says Carandell, a framework that the Parliament used to paralyze the 25% ruling, which, due to an appeal from a single family, changed the entire framework. What the entity points out is that the TSJC has updated its arguments so that the TC will take them to support its ruling on the 25% of Spanish, and it is still pending publication.

Although for practical purposes the ruling will not have an immediate impact on classrooms, as the decree falls, schools "will continue to be without regulation under the Catalan education law, which is what the court criticized the Generalitat for," Carandell lamented on TV3. The decree was intended to regulate linguistic uses and offer greater security to schools. The Platform for the Language has announced that it will also file an appeal, pending the Constitutional Court's ruling on the 25% Catalan language requirement in classrooms. They already predict that "it could completely destroy the system" because, they claim, "the judicial mechanism is biased."

Òmnium Cultural regrets that "the day before the National Day, the High Court of Justice (TSJC) is once again engaging in politics against Catalonia and its school model." The organization calls the court "politicized and anti-Catalan" and asserts that it is dismantling "a parliamentary and social consensus endorsed for decades in our country." It also announces a judicial response, and its president, Xavier Antich, says that the National Day demonstration will also serve to defend the school model. The Catalan National Assembly (ANC) has spoken of a "new coup d'état against the language."

For its part, ERC lamented the decision of the TSJC (High Court of Justice), and the secretary general of the Republicans, Elisenda Alamany, accused the judges of "continuing to engage in politics in violation of all pedagogical criteria." In this regard, she asked the president of the Generalitat (Catalan regional government), Salvador Illa, to file an appeal against the ruling. "It is a threat to our country," she warned. Junts (Junts) also criticized the decision. Its spokesperson in Parliament, Mònica Sales, denounced "the interference and attack" that she believes the TSJC (High Court of Justice) has perpetrated against the Catalan language and demanded that the government act "forcefully" to "reverse the violation of rights."

Complicity of the Prosecutor's Office

The entity that filed the appeal, Escuela Bilingüe (AEB), welcomed the ruling, which it hopes will force schools to "adapt" their language programs so that "Spanish is the teaching language and not just a subject" and because, it states, "educational centers do not impose monolingual language programs in Catalan." The procedure promoted by the AEB has always enjoyed the complicity of the Prosecutor's Office, which argued that the decree promoted "the elimination of Spanish as the teaching and learning language" and sought to relegate it "to mere curricular and educational use." Therefore, in the opinion of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the regulation would contravene the Constitution, the Statute of Autonomy, and the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

Although the TSJC (High Court of Justice) has repealed most of the decree on language regulation, it maintains some articles because the AEB (Spanish Association of Workers' Associations) lacks the legitimacy to appeal beyond the right to education. Therefore, it cannot intervene in sections such as the one regulating the use of Catalan and Aranese in the external promotion of educational centers and the one establishing Catalan as the official language of the educational administration. The TSJC has also not altered the section dedicated to the language of selection processes or the language skills that non-teaching staff must demonstrate.