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<h1 class="">What You Need To Know About EU Language Law</h1>
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<span class="">by <a href="http://slator.com/author/stefaan-van-der-jeught/">Stefaan Van der Jeught</a></span> on February 2, 2016 </div>
<div class=""><a href="http://slator.com/features/" class="">Features</a></div> </div>
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<div class=""><img src="http://slator.com/assets/2016/02/shutterstock_338678933-768x495.jpg" alt="What You Need To Know About EU Language Law"></div>
<p>In a recently published book (EU Language Law), based on PhD
research, I explore all current language regulations and arrangements in
EU law, such as linguistic regimes of EU institutions, bodies and
agencies, language provisions in the area of freedom, security and
justice as well as in the internal market. In an exclusive for Slator, I
highlight some of the findings of the research in ten points.</p>
<h3>1. No clear-cut criteria for EU Treaty or official languages</h3>
<p>Whether a given language rises or not to the status of EU Treaty
language depends, first of all, on the EU Member State concerned. This
leads to the rather paradoxical situation that the number of speakers is
irrelevant for a language to acquire EU language status. To take the
most extreme examples, Catalan, spoken by millions of citizens, is not
an EU Treaty language, whereas many far less widely spoken languages,
such as Maltese or Irish, do enjoy such status.</p><div class=""><div class="" style="width:468px;height:60px"><span class="">Advertisement</span>
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<p>In addition, Treaty language status has been regarded essential to
get EU official language status. This follows from the discussion
regarding a limited official language status for Catalan, Galician and
Basque, where the presidency of the Council held that only EU Treaty
languages may be chosen. Yet, in relation to Turkish, the EU seems
prepared to grant that language official status provided that an
agreement is reached on the reunification of Cyprus, regardless of the
fact that Turkish is not a Treaty language. In actual fact, Turkish
could be much closer to acquiring EU official language status than many
observers think. An agreement on the reunification of Cyprus is all that
is required.</p>
<h3>2. A huge gap between theory and reality</h3>
<p>From the early days of the European Coal and Steel Community until
the present European Union, the language issue has never been properly
dealt with. A formal regime of equality of languages and full
multilingualism was established as a recognition of the cultural
sovereignty of the Member States. As a result, all languages were
granted Treaty, official and working language status and became equally
authentic.</p>
<blockquote><p>In practice, however, decisions on internal linguistic
arrangements (a limited set of working languages) were, for a large
part, left to the various EU institutions.</p></blockquote>
<h3>3. Full language regimes are not the general rule</h3>
<p>Despite the general duties stipulated in the basic Regulation
(1/1958) on the linguistic regime of the EU, the cases in which a real
legal obligation exists to use all official EU languages are essentially
limited to two fields of operation: legislation and direct
communication with EU Member States and private persons. The EU courts,
which fall outside the scope of Regulation 1/1985, also operate on a
multilingual basis, allowing for cases to be brought in all EU official
languages.</p>
<h3>4. The law: the core of multilingualism</h3>
<p>The obligation to publish EU legislation in all the EU official
languages must be strictly observed and no exceptions are allowed.</p>
<p>Legal certainty indeed requires that all subjects of EU law should be
afforded easy access to that legislation in their own language. The
case in point in this regard is Skoma-Lux, in which the European Court
of Justice clearly held that a regulation is only enforceable against
individuals in a Member State if it has been published in the language
of that State.</p>
<p>In that regard, all twenty-four EU official languages are equally
authentic. This may lead to interpretation problems. A solution would be
to provide for a reference version in one EU official language for
every act of legislation, preferably the language in which the act was
originally drafted. It may be noted in this context that a similar rule
exists for judgments of the Court of Justice, which are authentic only
in the language of the case.</p>
<div id="attachment_3012" style="width:310px" class=""><img class="" src="http://slator.com/assets/2016/02/Stefaan-Van-der-Jeughtcropped-208x210.jpg" alt="Dr. Stefaan Van der Jeught, Press Officer of the European Court of Justice" height="303" width="300"><p class="">Dr. Stefaan Van der Jeught</p></div>
<h3>5. What about direct communication with companies and citizens?</h3>
<p>EU Member States, as well as citizens or companies have, in
principle, the right to choose in which official EU language written and
oral communications with the EU institutions and bodies will take
place.</p>
<p>This right is, however, not unlimited, and in language disputes
between EU institutions and Member States no clear-cut rules are
discernible. Case law shows that the Court of Justice assesses the
effects of linguistic irregularities on a case-by-case basis. Only if,
were it not for that irregularity, the procedure could have led to a
different result, may the act concerned be annulled.</p>
<p>Likewise, with regard to communications between an EU institution and
companies, it is settled case law that an infringement of the
linguistic rules does not automatically entail nullity of the act at
issue. Rather, such a consequence is limited to cases in which the
linguistic irregularity entailed harmful effects.</p>
<blockquote><p>Moreover, communication with a number of EU bodies and
agencies may not necessarily take place in all official EU languages, as
they are governed by specific language arrangements.</p></blockquote>
<h3>6. Many restricted language regimes exist</h3>
<p>Although, formally, all those languages which have acquired EU
language status are equal, in practice, a clear hierarchy exists,
creating a gap between the legal and the actual situation.</p>
<p>As to language arrangements in the EU public administration,
restricted language regimes have evolved over the years, based on a
rather broad interpretation of article 6 of Regulation 1/1958, whereby
the EU institutions “may stipulate in their rules of procedure which of
the languages are to be used in specific cases”. This article provides
the legal basis for quite a large linguistic autonomy of the EU
institutions.</p>
<p>The case law of the Court of Justice has, essentially, confirmed the
legality of such restricted language regimes. The Court has consistently
taken a rather pragmatic view of the language issue in this regard and
has held, in the landmark Kik case as well as in subsequent judgments,
that there is no general principle of equality of languages in the EU,
nor that every citizen is entitled to have a version of anything that
might affect his interests drawn up in his language in all
circumstances. Accordingly, when justified and proportionate, restricted
language regimes may be established.</p>
<p>It should be recalled that, contrary to what is often held, such
restricted language regimes are, by no means, limited to purely internal
situations. Hence, on the explicit basis of Regulation 1/1958,
information available on websites and in publications, relations with
the media, public consultations, meetings with representatives of
national administrations, as well as calls for expression of interest,
can, as the case may be, all take place in a restricted number of
languages only, most often English, French and German.</p>
<p>In this context, it was shown that most EU institutions apply, in
varying degrees, restricted language regimes. The most multilingual
institutions are the European Parliament and the Court of Justice.</p>
<blockquote><p>For the more than forty EU agencies, heterogeneous language arrangements exist.</p></blockquote>
<p>Essentially, they can be divided into four types, i.e. agencies
explicitly governed by Regulation 1/1958, agencies without any formal
language arrangements, agencies where the management Board (or the
Council of the EU) is entitled to lay down the language regime and,
lastly, the special case of the Trade Mark Office, with a language
regime, restricted to English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Only
on a rare occasion can a decision regarding working language(s) be
found, whereas it is obvious from recruitment requirements and website
information that English has become the main working language of the
vast majority of these EU agencies.</p>
<h3>7. Lack of formal decisions with regard to language arrangements</h3>
<p>EU language arrangements are largely implicit and not based on formal
decisions. The clear lack of transparency appears as highly
problematic.</p>
<p>The lack of formal, explicit decisions concerning language
arrangements was also criticized by the Court of Justice in a recent
landmark case regarding recruitment policy. The Court imposed stricter
respect for multilingualism in these selection procedures and set limits
to a recruitment policy in three languages only, stressing that the EU
institutions concerned never adopted rules of procedure in accordance
with article 6 of Regulation 1/1958 nor had taken other measures laying
down criteria governing the choice of a language.</p>
<p>The lack of formal decisions could therefore lead to serious legal
problems in the future, not only with regard to recruitment, but also,
for instance, concerning public consultations, where the European
Ombudsman criticised the absence of a clear language pattern.</p>
<blockquote><p>The same is true for tenders, where often only a limited
number of languages may be used, leading to a clear disadvantage for
certain companies not having those languages and thus facing important
translation costs.</p></blockquote>
<h3>8. Questionable and non-transparent criteria used for the choice of restricted language policies</h3>
<p>Transparency is also lacking in the justification of restricted
language policies, particularly in the criteria on the basis of which
some languages are selected and others not. These criteria are not
merely political, as the legal equality of languages allows only for
restricted language regimes provided that the choice of languages is
objectively justified by specific operational needs and is, furthermore,
proportionate.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, the basic issue as to why not one common language
is used, for the sake of limiting costs and efficiency, is
insufficiently addressed.</p>
<blockquote><p>By contrast, in regard to language arrangements for the
European Patent with unitary effect (EU Patent) and a unified patent
litigation system, more objective criteria were used. For the first time
ever, the European Commission included impact analysis reports
concerning the translation arrangements in its draft proposal.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet, the actual caseload, which could have been easily assessed on
the basis of the existing European Patent, was not taken into
consideration. The assessment did take various other criteria into
account, such as multilingualism and the impact of the language regime
on stakeholders, particularly SME’s in the EU Member States, as well as
overall costs of translation. However, the assessment could easily have
led to alternative language regimes, using only English, or,
alternatively, English and German.</p>
<h3>9. The absence of language teaching priorities: a counter-intuitive strategy</h3>
<p>The application of the diversity principle has led the EU to adopt a
multilingualism agenda, which is essentially a language learning policy,
setting as a benchmark that all EU citizens should learn at least two
languages in addition to their native tongue. The scope of foreign
languages which may be chosen is broad, and not limited to EU Treaty or
official languages, but also includes regional and minority languages,
as well as languages of migrant communities.</p>
<p>This policy is clearly flawed by the absence of language teaching
priorities. The only indication in this context is a negative one,
stating that the teaching of English is not enough.</p>
<p>The mother tongue plus two policy is indeed meant to serve the
interest of linguistic diversity in forming a counterweight for the
predominance of English, taken by most Europeans as their first and, in
many cases, only foreign language.</p>
<p>Yet, the teaching of at least one lingua franca could greatly advance other EU aims, such as, above all, market integration.</p>
<p>In practice, the policy seems to favour in the first place the teaching of other major languages.</p>
<p>Last but not least, the benchmark seems unrealistic. In 2013, the
Commission admitted that only 42% of tested pupils could be considered
independent users in their first foreign language, and that a large
number of pupils (14%) did not even achieve the level of basic users.
The data collected by Eurostat also show that the education systems of
the EU fall short of the objective of teaching two or more foreign
languages: only 40% of pupils in lower secondary education get such
language teaching. Quite a number of EU Member States even show a
significant drop of people speaking at least two foreign languages. EU
Member States may actually prefer students to learn one foreign language
well, rather than two at an intermediate level.</p>
<h3>10. A common language?</h3>
<p>Objectives set in the internal market and in the area of freedom,
security and justice do, in fact, require a common tongue. The
reluctance of the EU to launch a debate on this issue could be
detrimental to the European project.</p>
<p><img class="" src="http://slator.com/assets/2016/02/EU-Language-Law.jpg" alt="EU Language Law" height="432" width="291"></p>
<p>Author: Stefaan van der Jeught (Oct 2015)<br>
Binding Paperback, 303p<br>
ISBN 9789089521729; ISBN Ebook 9789089521736<br>
Price €64</p>
<p>The book is available at <a href="http://www.europalawpublishing.com/NL/webshop/0/0/1/80343" target="_blank">Europa Law Publishing</a>
or from good booksellers everywhere. For orders in the USA: ISBS,
International Specialized Book Services, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300,
Portland, OR 97213-3786,<br>
phone toll-free within North America 1-800-944-6190, fax 1-503-280-8832, <a href="http://www.isbs.com">www.isbs.com</a>, <a href="mailto:orders@isbs.com">orders@isbs.com</a></p><p><br></p><a href="http://slator.com/features/what-you-need-to-know-about-eu-language-law/">http://slator.com/features/what-you-need-to-know-about-eu-language-law/</a><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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