The last General Affairs Council (CAG) of the European Union held under the Spanish presidency will not be the last in which Spain’s request to include Catalan, Galician and Basque in the linguistic regime of the community institutions will be debated. Belgium, which on January 1 will take over from Spain in the rotating presidency of the Council, “has confirmed that the matter will continue to be discussed in the Council so that discussions can continue until its final approval,” the Secretary of State for the EU has announced. and current president of the CAG, Pascual Navarro, at the end of the meeting, the fourth in which the Twenty-Seven have analyzed the Spanish request.
“Since our last meeting, progress has been made regarding the evaluation of costs, legal analysis and other legal and political considerations,” summarized Navarro, who recalled that the Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, sent a letter yesterday letter to the rest of the countries of the Union to explain the legal framework on which the Spanish proposal is based, which establishes conditions to request the official status that the three co-official languages ??have and that make them “unique” in Europe, the key argument of Madrid to allay the fears of some countries that the green light for the Spanish request will open the door to a barrage of demands in the same sense.
In that letter, to which La Vanguardia has had access, the Spanish Government defines the five criteria that must be met: “have its origin in a Member State, have constitutional recognition in a Member State, that a copy of the Treaties has been translated to those languages ??and has been deposited in the archives of the Council in accordance with Article 55.2 of the Treaty on European Union, a Member State has requested their recognition as official and working languages ??of the Institutions of the Union and has undertaken to assume all the costs derived from their use in the Institutions of the Union” and, finally, “being working languages ??in the national Parliament of a Member State”.
“The Government is working with the Council’s legal service to ensure that the proposal is fully in accordance with Community law and has recalled that it is willing to assume the cost of its proposal,” Navarro detailed at the end of the CAG held today in Brussels, in which the European Commission has transmitted to the Twenty-seven the “preliminary evaluation” carried out by the interpretation and translation services on the financial impact that going from 24 to 27 languages ??would have. The report, which warns that it offers very approximate figures, is based on the experience of incorporating Gaelic into the official languages ??of the institutions and raises the cost of the Spanish request to 132 million euros per year, 34 million per language. According to the community executive, the real cost will depend largely on factors such as the availability of interpreters and translators (which was very limited in the Irish case) and the use of artificial intelligence.
Diplomatic sources from Belgium – a country with three official languages, Dutch, French and German – have confirmed to La Vanguardia their willingness, as the future rotating presidency of the Council, to continue analyzing the Spanish request. “Belgium is ready to take appropriate measures on this issue during our presidency, with particular attention to the different analyzes on the legal, political and practical implications requested by member states,” they say, highlighting the need to carry out more discussions at a technical level before raising the discussion again to the political level or proposing that a decision be made. Navarro, speaking in this case more as Secretary of State of Spain than as acting president of the CAG, has assured that the Government is confident of resolving the pending issues “shortly” and being able to “move forward quickly” but has avoided committing to a specific calendar. .
