- The Spanish Government has sent a new proposal to the other Member States. In this second proposal the first text submitted a few weeks ago has been adapted. It is not expected that a final decision will be taken at the meeting on Wednesday, but the issue of the Basque, Catalan and Galician official will be raised again. No one will be able to vote against to obtain the official status.
After rejecting in October the decision of the Member States of the European Union on the official status of Basque, Catalan and Galician, the Council of the European Union stated that Euskera “should wait”. This Wednesday the General Bureau of the European Union will raise the issue again through the new proposal of the Spanish Government to the Member States. P. Thousands According to Ansa Berria, this determines that Euskera, Catalan and Galician are official languages in their respective fields; that there are administrative agreements with the European institutions to use those languages in some communications; and that the decision will not be a precedent for formalising other languages in Europe.
On this occasion, the text that Spain sent to the European Union for the first time has been amended "applying the lessons learned from that text". But, as the agency Efe berri has received from diplomatic sources, some representatives of states “were not happy” because Spain has sent the text only in Spanish and two days before the meeting. A source from the Dutch Government explained that “on Tuesday, the eve of the meeting, we could not read the document”.
Conduct of the debate
Euskera, Catalan and Galician will or will not be included in the list of official languages of the European Union, for which Spain has registered a request for the adaptation of Regulation 1/1958 on language arrangements. Some consider that, if accepted, these languages would represent “significant progress”, as they should be taken into account in all the institutions that make up the European Union.
However, others consider that Euskera, Catalan and Galician are “regional languages” and that their acceptance would open the way to demand their official status in other minority languages.
Unanimous adoption
Although the request must be approved by the European Council, the Commission will be composed of the Foreign Ministers of the 27 countries of the European Union, who will have to approve it unanimously. There can be no vote against, but they can abstain. At the moment, some members of the committee have been reluctant and the Spanish Government must negotiate with these countries to abstain.