The last Council of General Affairs (CAG) of the European Union held under the Spanish presidency, yesterday in Brussels, will not be the last in which Spain’s request to include Catalan, Galician and ‘Basque in the linguistic regime of the community institutions. Belgium, which will assume the rotating presidency on January 1, “has confirmed that the matter will continue to be discussed in the Council so that discussions can continue until its final approval”, announced the Secretary of State for the EU and President of the CAG, Pascual Navarro, at the end of the meeting, the fourth in which the request was analyzed.
“Since our last meeting, progress has been made regarding the evaluation of costs, the legal analysis and other legal and political considerations”, concluded Navarro, who evoked the letter sent the day before by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, to the rest of the countries of the Union in which he explains the legal framework of the Spanish proposal, which sets conditions for requesting the officiality of the three co-official languages ??of the Spanish State and which makes them ” unique” in Europe, Madrid’s key argument to appease the fear of some countries that it opens the door to an avalanche of similar demands.
“The Government is working with the legal service of the Council to ensure that the proposal is fully in line with the legal order of the Union” and “remembered that it is prepared to assume the cost of the proposal”, detailed Navarro at the end of the Council, during which the member states held a debate of about 20 minutes on the subject in which the European Commission presented to the Twenty-seven the “preliminary assessment” carried out by the interpretation and translation services on the financial impact that going from 24 to 27 languages ??would have. The report, which offers very approximate figures, as it is based on the experience of incorporating Gaelic into the official languages ??of the institutions, raises the cost of the Spanish request to 132 million euros a year. According to the Community Executive, the actual cost will depend a lot on the availability of interpreters and translators (very limited in the Irish case) and the use of artificial intelligence.
Diplomatic sources in 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 the appropriate measures on this subject during our presidency, with particular attention to the different analyzes on the legal, political and practical implications requested by the states”, they affirm, and highlight the need to lead to further technical discussions before bringing the discussion back to the political level or proposing a vote on reform.
Navarro, speaking in this case more as Secretary of State of Spain than as acting president of the CAG, assured that the Government of Pedro Sánchez is confident of resolving “very soon” the outstanding issues and being able to “move forward quickly”. but he avoided committing to a specific timetable for approving the Spanish initiative.
