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 has annulled a large part of the Linguistic Regime Decree that Pere Aragonès's government approved to protect Catalan in schools and which It had already been 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 the decree. 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 you can do for coexistence. Catalan must continue to be the inclusive, proper, and transversal language of the country and the school," he stated.

The court has annulled more than a dozen articles of the decree, including those establishing that Catalan and Aranese are the vehicular languages in schools, and the section that stipulates that the habitual language of teachers and of communications with families must be Catalan. The ruling was announced just before the Diada (National Day of the People), when the AEB (Association of Catalans) released it, but the judges had already deliberated and voted on their decision on July 15. However, until Monday they had not notified the ruling, which comes while 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 Castilian.

In fact, the decree now annulled by the TSJC was based precisely on this regulation, which is in the hands of the TC. Although it has been warned for months that the ruling on language percentages in classrooms could be announced soon, and it would be a setback for Catalan, for the moment the Constitutional Court has not made any move.

Since this decree was only in force for a month until the court suspended it, the High Court of Justice'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 High Court sees an "imbalance in favor of Catalan"

The judges who annulled most sections of the Decree on the Language Regime argue that they 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." They argue that 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 consider that all the articles of the Decree on the Language Regime that they annulled have "a common purpose: to systematically establish that Catalan (and Aranese in Aran) constitutes the language normally used as a vehicle and for learning" in the educational 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 contemplated" to ensure that all students master it by the end of compulsory education. 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. "It 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.

New resource and citizen mobilization

Language advocacy organizations have immediately commented on the TSJC's decision. For the Platform for the Language, it represents an "attack on the foundation of the immersion system" because it "removes the articles that refer to the vehicular use of Catalan, Aranese, and Catalan Sign Language not with a scalpel but with a large mouthpiece" and only allows organizational provisions to pass. For the director of the Platform, Ruth Carandell, the ruling is no surprise because "it merely repeats the arguments that the TSJC has already made in other rulings," such as the 25% restriction in classrooms. The court notes that there is a language imbalance in favor of Catalan and the lack of protection of Spanish in schools, while the Catalan school advocates that the system guarantees students' final proficiency in both languages.

Although in practice the ruling will have no immediate impact on classrooms, since the decree is over, schools "will continue to be deprived of regulation by Catalonia's education law, which is what the court criticized the Generalitat for," Ruth Carandell lamented on TV3. The decree was intended to regulate linguistic usage and offer greater security to schools. The Platform for Language has announced that it will file an appeal, pending the Constitutional Court's ruling on the 25% Catalan requirement in classrooms, which they already anticipate "could ultimately undermine the system" because, they claim, "the judicial mechanism is biased."

Òmnium Cultural regrets that "the day before the Diada, 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 dismantles "a parliamentary and social consensus endorsed for decades in our country." They also announce a judicial response, and their president, Xavier Antich, says that the Diada demonstration will also serve to defend the school model. The Catalan National Assembly has spoken of a "new coup d'état against the language."

Complicity of the Prosecutor's Office

The entity that filed the appeal, Escuela Bilingüe (AEB), welcomed the ruling, which they hope will force schools to "adapt" their language programs so that "Spanish is the teaching language and not just a subject" and because, they assert, "schools should not impose monolingual language programs in Catalan." The procedure initiated 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 curricular and educational use." Therefore, in the opinion of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the regulation would violate 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 the Language Regime, 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.