The former leader of the Popular Party, Pablo Casado, testified yesterday as an investigator before a judge in Barcelona for having said in a meeting – in December 2021 – that there were teachers in Catalonia who did not let children go to the toilet they spoke in Spanish and that some of them put stones in their backpacks to speak in Spanish during recess. Casado assured that he did not contradict this statement and that he was guided by the journalistic information in which members of the educational community were interviewed who denounced the situation of Spanish in the classrooms.
However, these claims were based on news from 2008 and another from 1997, decontextualized, which did not refer to Catalonia but to the Basque Country. Casado appeared before the head of the 29th District Court of Barcelona, ??who cited him as being investigated for a crime of defamation after accepting the complaint presented by the Generalitat. He testified by video conference and answered only questions from the judge and his lawyer. At a PP event in Galicia, Casado said: “Can it be tolerated that there are teachers with instructions not to let children go to the toilet because they speak Spanish?”. According to PP sources, “in no case does Pablo Casado claim that this is what teachers should do, but asks if it is tolerable that there are instructions so that some are forced to do it”.
The same sources detail that he did it based on a news story from 2008 which they emphasize was not denied and which was published by the newspaper El Mundo about a monitor of a children’s school who denounced that her coordinator demanded of her not to answer the children in Spanish even if they told him they were hungry or asked him to go to the bathroom in Spanish”. The other sentence from Casado that is the subject of the complaint was: “Can it be tolerated that there are children who, for speaking Spanish at playground time, put stones in their backpacks?”. These words were uttered by the leader of the PP in relation to a news story published in 1997 by El Correo which said that some children from a Basque summer camp were forced to carry stones in order to speak to each other in Spanish.
With these words, Casado said that he intended to denounce the language policy of the Generalitat and defend the family of Canet de Mar who was a victim of hate crimes to legally claim that his son receive at least 25% of classes in Spanish. In addition, he added that these statements were protected by the parliamentary inviolability that assisted him to be a deputy, although he pronounced the words in an act of the PP and not of the Congress. In front of the judge, Casado also complained about having received different treatment since many Catalan parliamentarians had said many things in Parliament and they had not been persecuted”, he said.
