French justice for the feet of the Catalan mayors and prevents French from being trampled in plenary sessions

2023-05-09 16:25:45

Setback of French justice to the Catalan mayors of the French towns of Port Vendres, Tarerach, Elna, Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda and Saint André, all of them in the Pyrénées-Orientales department. Said aldermen approved municipal regulations that relegated the French language to the background and cThey de facto converted Catalan into the single-use language in plenary sessions That is to say, what is normal in the region of Catalonia but which in France is not interpreted in any way as something normal.

These French mayors hide behind the dissemination of Catalan in their municipalities and the preservation of said language to carry out the plenary sessions in Catalan and later translate the interventions into French. However, the administrative court of Montpellier has declared these regulations invalid on the grounds that they French is the official language of the Republic and that its official nature and primacy cannot be questioned by allowing mayors and councilors to speak first in Catalan and for such interventions to be later translated into French.

The mayors claim to rely on the European Charter for regional or minority languages, but the French justice considers that the municipal regulations that prioritize Catalan They are contrary to your constitution..

The lawyer for these townspeople, Mateu Pons, interprets the sentence in a positive sense, since he points out that the mayors and councilors will be able to translate their interventions in French into Catalan. The mayors, for their part, assure that the ruling is a “slap” to Catalan and they announce that they will continue to file lawsuits until they reach the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

The news has caused a stir in the Catalan pro-independence media, which refer to the municipalities mentioned as being members of “Catalunya Nord” and in which the Generalitat has invested for years million euros to promote the use of Catalan and its teaching in schools.