Joseph Sunday, president of Impulso Ciudadano and advisory member of the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia (AEB), has been fighting for years for the linguistic rights of students, parents and teachers in Catalan classrooms. He is also the lawyer behind the resources of the families that, like the one from Canet de Mar, fight to get the schools to comply with the Superior Court of Justice ruling that requires them to teach a minimum of 25% of the classes. in Spanish.
Now, after the offensive initiated by Pere Aragonés In order not to abide by the court ruling, Domingo has announced that they will defend themselves in Europe, where they will inform the institutions of what they consider to be an “unfair action” by the Generalitat of Catalonia, “which tries to condition the actions of Justice through such intolerable pressures» as the last approved decree law.
QUESTION.- How has the royal decree been received by families fighting for a bilingual school?
RESPONSE.- It has not been received well, to the extent that the instructions given by the Minister of Education have the fundamental purpose, precisely, of making Catalan the only vehicular language and prohibiting bilingual education. That is, a balanced presence of the two official languages in the Catalan school.
In addition, we find it especially worrying that the Minister of Education has decided to ignore the request made at the time by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia and nullify the ruling that advocated a bilingual education model for all Catalans.
Q.- How can this decree law affect the execution of the ruling of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia that requires teaching 25% of classes in Spanish??
R.- We understand that they are two different worlds. One is the content of the decree law, which will have the route it has to take and which obviously has serious overtones of unconstitutionality, and another is compliance with the sentence.
The sentences are to be executed on their own terms and the terms of the December 2020 sentence of the Superior Court of Justice were very clear. At least 25% of teaching in Catalonia must be taught in Spanish, or in Catalan in the case of those centers in which the presence of Spanish is the majority, which is none, unfortunately, in Catalonia.
Q.- What errors have you detected in the decree law?
R.- We understand, first of all, that the Generalitat was not competent to issue this decree law, since there are no reasons of urgency, which is what justifies the drafting and approval of a decree law. Nor does he care about the matter he is addressing. We must remember that teaching, education, is a fundamental right of all Spaniards and the decree laws cannot regulate fundamental rights, with which there is a very clear vice of form. But it is that, in addition, the content goes in the opposite direction to what has been established by the doctrine of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, which, I insist, is that it recognizes the right of all Catalan students to be educated in both languages.
Q.- The Catalan executive has referred to the 25% ruling as a “judicial interference motivated by ideological persecution.” How do you rate these statements?
R.- Of course, what it does show is very little democratic quality and very little respect for the separation of powers. In other words, the fact that there are political representatives who have institutional positions that express themselves in those terms seems especially serious to us. From an institutional point of view, in defense of the rule of law, that the political power in Catalonia once again becomes an insurgent power, which does not accept the current legality of the court rulings, is very worrying.
We must remember that, in a rule of law, one of the basic principles is that of effective judicial protection and, in this case, the action of the authority goes in the opposite direction. They try to limit the separation of powers, when other countries have already been condemned in the European Union for similar actions.
For this reason, we, to the best of our ability, will inform the European institutions of this linguistic discrimination and the disloyal, serious action that the Generalitat of Catalonia maintains, which tries to condition the actions of the courts through such pressure intolerable as those we have known during these days.
Q.- Do you plan to present a pleadings brief before the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia, any details that you can give us?
R.- We are currently preparing the document. What I can anticipate is that the behavior of the Generalitat will receive a forceful response from us, because we understand that the sentence has not been carried out correctly and that the Minister of Education, Josep González-Cambray (ERC) is responsible for that non-execution, with the consequences that this entails both in the contentious-administrative and criminal jurisdictional order.
Q.- What kind of consequences?
R.- We could speak of disobedience and prevarication and, along these lines, we believe that the court can assess it. In any case, it is a document that is being prepared, so I cannot yet confirm what its final development will be.
Q.- We all have the Canet de Mar family in mind. Has this case been a before and after for other families to take the step and also claim that 25% of classes in Spanish?
R.- There are already 1,643 families that have requested that the sentence be carried out. With which we can feel especially satisfied that hundreds of families, in a very short time, have decided to take the step and request a bilingual school model. Canet’s assumption, like other previous ones, which have been many, has influenced and more and more Catalans lose their fear to request that their children be enrolled in a module of linguistic conjunction, that is, Spanish and Catalan as the vehicular language.
Q.- We also remember the harassment by the independence movement that was experienced in those days. What do families who demand a bilingual education face?
R.- The case of Canet de Mar was, in our opinion, punctual, to the extent that the independence movement took advantage of it to channel its anger at the execution of the sentence. The Ministry wanted to put them on the pillory precisely in an exemplary way, to try to dissuade other requests. Later there have been other families who have been granted the same right and nothing has happened, because most of the time, in the vast majority of cases, when people apply for the bilingual school model, they do not have major problems because of This, except for the inconvenience of having to request the exercise of a fundamental right that the Constitution already recognizes.
Q.- Is the linguistic problem in Catalonia a failure of politics, of the courts or of schools?
R.- It is a failure of the policy, it is evident. We have almost 30 years of compulsory linguistic immersion in Catalonia, of monolingualism. Thousands of people have claimed the linguistic conjunction. However, educational administrations have never asked parents what model of education they want in terms of language regime.
In addition, there is very clear institutional pressure from linguistic nationalism to impose a single language. Nationalism considers that the expansion of Catalan as a language of use, as a language of identification, favors its interests and therefore they put all the meat on the grill, to create linguistic barriers between the Catalans and the rest of the Spanish.
Q.-How do you assess the PSOE’s support for the bill on “the use and learning of official languages in non-university education”?
R.- We think they have made a serious mistake. Let’s say that perhaps they were looking for a linguistic consensus and that path is not the right one, as the Government of the Generalitat itself has shown with the approval of a decree law that goes even further and that makes clear the serious mistake of the Socialist Party , who has trusted some traveling companions who, of course, are anything but loyal.
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