The European institutions have begun to examine Spain’s request for Catalan, Basque and Galician to become official languages of the European Union (EU), a process that could take years to achieve full status, as has already happened. to Gaelic. “The Council has received a letter from the Spanish government and will examine it,” a European source said on Thursday. the letter of Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albaresasks the Council, the institution that represents the EU countries and that Spain chairs during this semester, to include this matter on the agenda of the next General Affairs Council, a meeting that brings together the heads of European Affairs of the States members and will be held in Brussels on 19 September.
It is not yet clear at what point the request for that meeting next year will arrive. September 19th: whether that day would be the subject of a first political debate between the ministers or whether a vote would already take place. The final vote must be outweighed by unanimity. Converting Catalan, Basque and Galician into official languages of the European Union would mean translating into these languages not only the treaties and all documentation and legislation produced from now on, but also the entire heritage of the last 65 years of the European project , from directives to sanctions through regulations or inter-institutional agreements.
The vast majority of the 24 official languages in the European Union they are through the entry of their Member State into the community club: it was the case of Spanish in 1986, English in 1973 or French, German, Italian and Dutch since the founding of the then European Economic Community (predecessor of the current EU) in 1958. It is in that year when the regulation that contains all the official languages of the European Union is approved and that has been amended every time a country became a partner and its main language, official for Brussels.
The notable exception to this rule is the case of Gaelic, which with Ireland’s accession to the European Union in 1973 became a treaty language rather than an official language: this meant that only treaties and no other Community documents or legislation They were then translated into Gaelic. In 2005, Ireland applied for Gaelic to gain official language status, which was approved in 2007. However, finding that there was a limited number of Gaelic translators and technological resources, it was decided that not all documents would be translated into that language. moment with a special temporary derogation expiring in 2022. This derogation began to be withdrawn in 2015 at the request of Ireland as Gaelic translation capacity in community bodies has increased and since 2022, 17 years after Dublin asked to convert it in official language, it is a language with full status before the European institutions.
In 2022, the Spanish Government sent a request to the European Parliament so that Catalan, Basque and Galician could be used in plenary sessions of the institution, a request for which the Bureau of the Eurochamber He has been waiting for months for a report from parliamentary services on the implications it would have for his day-to-day life, from translation and interpretation departments to infrastructure and finance departments. The process to convert these three languages into official languages of the EU has nothing to do with the one open in the European Parliament and goes beyond what Madrid requested in 2022. The European Parliament does not rule on whether or not a language should be official in the EU, since that competence falls entirely on the Council (the countries).