The High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV) has annulled part of the Regulation of linguistic uses of the University of Valencia (UV), in particular the point that stipulated that internal communication with its staff should be written only in Valencian, since said employees “have a duty to know it”, and which de facto prevented the use of Castilian.
The decision of the Contentious-Administrative Court number 5 of Valencia, last Monday, September 23, against which there is still an appeal, leaves without effect the agreement concluded by the University’s Board of Directors on June 8, 2023, in which the amended article 10 of its internal regulations relating to linguistic uses in favor of the exclusive use of Valencian.
This new regulation required that administrative documents and internal communications be written in Valencian “without prejudice to the rights of citizens established in general legislation.”
Thus, “taking into account the legal obligation to know one’s own language of the university, all communications and documents addressed exclusively to UV staff will be written in Valencian,” states the section annulled by the judge, which included information posters, telephone meetings, emails, as well as reports, memoranda, payment orders, minutes, registrations, payroll and all kinds of contracts and agreements, among other aspects.
The statutory amendment was appealed by six professors of constitutional lawwhich alleged the violation of the right of the staff of the academic institution, as well as its students, to receive and access communications and documentation in Spanish or in a bilingual version.
To this request, presented first to the UV before the Court, the university responded that “it had no intention of preventing its employees from interacting in Spanish” and that the term “without prejudice to linguistic rights” meant that the use of Valencian was not exclusive.
Ultimately, the court confirmed that the amendment was “ambiguous” and gave as an example three cases in which internal communication occurred only in Valencian. Specifically, two emails from the head of human resources and another from the university’s analysis and planning department, and a last one that responds to the UV’s response to the call, written only in Valencian and that alludes to an error.
