The Supreme Court annulled the inadmissibility of the appeal presented by the Assembly by a Bilingual School of Catalonia (AEB) against the instructions of the Ministry of Education of the Generalitat for the school year 2022-2023, when schools and institutes of the community were under the direction of Josep González-Cambray (ERC). The High Court ordered the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to rule on the merits, which represents a new attempt by the Generalitat to expel Spanish from the classrooms.
In a particularly technical judgment, which does not address the merits of the linguistic question appealed by the AEB and consulted by ABC, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court annulled the orders of the TSJC which, in November 2022 , they rejected the appeal of the entity that defends bilingualism in schools in Catalonia and which has considered that the documents published on the website of the Ministry of Education relating to the organization and management of schools for the 2022-2023 school year , which referred, among other aspects, to the treatment and use of languages in the education system were not in accordance with the law.
Faced with the criteria of the TSJC, which also did not grant precautionary measures and understood that the documents were not admissible because they lacked a normative character and did not innovate the legal framework, the Supreme Court has now indicated that the provisions contained in the literature on education “advanced on the legal regulation of the use of languages in education and, therefore, underline a normative virtuality which imposes itself on a wide range of subjects, not limited to the educational relationship in the strict sense, but more extended.
“It therefore does not appear that the controversial action is a simple service instruction or internal consumer circular, but rather something more, so that it is not justified to consider that it is not actionable”, the High Court noted, adding that “the name does not make the thing and under the name of service instructions and circulars or other similar administrative acts one can find that They go beyond the simple internal task and not innovative which distinguishes said instructions and circulars.
For this reason and in agreement with the AEB which appealed to the Supreme Court in cassation, it annulled the orders of inadmissibility of the TSJC and agreed to postpone the procedure so that rule on the substantive issues raised in the appeal. This concerns the legality of excluding the use of Spanish in classrooms in the region. A decision that directly affects the regulations for the 2022-2023 academic year, but which will set a precedent for possible appeals against similar regulations, dictated by the Ministry of Education, in subsequent academic years.
In its judgment, the Supreme Court stated that the AEB and the prosecution emphasized that in the contested documents there were “absence of any mention of Spanish, which is also an official language in Catalonia”, that the lawyer of the Generalitat defended should not be understood as an exclusion. “However, the terms of these documents, of which the public prosecutor emphasizes its vocation to govern and transcend, do not seem consistent with the presence of Spanish alongside the Catalan language,” added the judges of the Supreme Court.
In this sense, the Supreme Court recalled that for the prosecution, they imply “an ecosystem, a total approach which goes beyond legal provisions, precisely because of its desire to form a Catalan citizenship identified with a common culture in which the Catalan language is a fundamental factor of social integration.
Statute and Constitution
The Supreme Court indicated that the provisions of the documents show a dissonance with the normative requirements which have the perspective of guaranteeing that students acquire oral and written mastery of Catalan and Spanish at the end of compulsory education, an objective also pursued by article 35.2 of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia which requires the adequate presence of both languages in the study plans, in accordance with Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution.
“The conclusion to which all that has been said leads is that in reality, the Ministry of Education introduced through the contested documents elements other than those contained in the aforementioned precepts and that They aim to connect all the areas on which they are projected, which go beyond what is strictly internal to the Administration”, indicated the High Court in the judgment.
The resolution establishes, finally, as a general criterion that “the instructions of the educational authorities on the educational project of the educational centers which transcend the internal framework of the Administration itself and contain elements which go beyond simple information, They are subject to contentious-administrative appeal.
