The approval of the use of co-official languages ??in the Congress of Deputies has not yet been fully deployed from a technical and electronic point of view. And the absence of the simultaneous translation service has muddled the proceedings of the Justice Commission this Thursday.
Everything has passed normally during the first interventions, including those of the PNV deputies Mikel Legarda, and of EH Bildu Jon Iñarritu, who have chosen to do so in Spanish. But after them has come the turn of the representative of Junts Josep María Cervera. Decided to intervene in Catalan, PP and Vox have protested angrily. “We are not worried about Catalan at all, what worries us is that when the chamber’s regulations were reformed we already said that the appropriate instruments must be provided,” said popular deputy María Jesús Moro.
In response to the angry complaints from the two right-wing parties, ERC spokesperson Pilar Vallugera explained that she was initially going to make her intervention in Spanish, allowing time for the application of the technical means of translation to be carried out. “But seeing how they have reacted to the opposition with that ability they have to make everything easy because we are going to do it in Catalan and also I don’t have it written down. From now on, I regret it, but if they want to expel me, they will expel me” , he blurted out.
The PP spokesperson, next, maintained that to “debate you have to understand each other”, and insisted that their honorable Members did not have devices to listen to the interventions translated into Spanish. At that time, the president of the Commission, Francisco Lucas, has chosen to provide the groups with the text of the intervention in Spanish, reiterating that this version, and no other, will be the one that appears in the session diary.
While Vox deputy Carlos Flores, for his part, has denounced that “the fact of not being able to understand the debate” that was “going to take place in this commission” deprives him of his “constitutional right to exercise public office.” representative”. “This right is not met by the delivery of a text in another language, among other things because there will surely not be a notarial protocol that will prove the coincidence between the oral intervention and the written intervention,” he criticized.
Flores has denounced “a double violation.” “Firstly, a violation of an agreement adopted in this Chamber with our vote against, of course, which is the use of regional languages ??in debates in plenary and in committee. And another, much more serious, I repeat, the violation of the right to public office of those who do not understand or do not wish to understand Catalan,” he stated.
The works that still need to be undertaken to renew the computer system and adapt it to the new electronic devices and the translation of the plenary sessions into the co-official languages, will cause a move in the Lower House.
Congress will have to organize its first plenary sessions of 2024 in the Senate. It will be in the territorial chamber, therefore, in which the amendments to the amnesty law proposal, which has caused so much rejection in the ranks of PP and Vox, will be debated.
