The Speaker of the Spanish Parliament removes the word to Galician and Catalan MPs speaking their languages

The president of the Spanish Parliament, Meritxell Batet (PSOE, Spanish Socialist), has removed the word today to CUP MP Albert Botran and the Galician BNG MP, Néstor Rego, to use the both Catalan and Galician respectively in defending their stance a non-law proposal that sought to urge the Spanish government to guarantee "the right to study exclusively in Spanish."

In the case of Botran, Batet has asked him four times to comply with the regulations and speak in Spanish, but the anti-capitalist deputy has refused. Arriving at the rostrum, the president of the chamber told him, "You must use the common language of this house and to which we owe it by regulation." Botran continued reporting in Catalan "Spanish linguistic nationalism" far right Vox and Batet removed the word to the deputy Free People party. Censorship and language supremacism of the Spanish majority against the minorities.

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The Canigó's Flame Begins Its Way From Northern Catalonia (French State) to the Southern

The Flama del Canigó ritual is gradually becoming more popular and more established. It combines with the Sant Joan midsummer celebrations to evoke the common identity of Catalan-speaking lands.
The fire of the Flama del Canigó (Canigou Flame) is never extinguished. It keeps burning throughout the year at the Perpignan Castellet until 22 June, when it is carried to the mountain's summit. At midnight the fire from the flame is shared out among those present. Straightaway they set off, splitting and spreading the fire to light the Sant Joan bonfires in hundreds of towns, villages and cities.
On foot or horseback, by car, bike, boat and any possible means of transport, the Flama del Canigó reaches every corner of the land, thanks to the efforts of numerous groups and associations. Each village, town and city receives the flame in it own way, with music, devils, dance, etc., but always with a shared ritual. Everywhere, when the flame has reached its destination, before the bonfires are lit, a common message is read out to remind everyone of its significance.
This mobilisation requires a big effort to coordinate the routes the flame takes, complete all the paperwork and steps required to get the necessary authorisation and permits, and to publicise the movement so as to highlight and spread it. Obviously, all this work starts many months before Sant Joan, and some years ago now, Òmnium Cultural took on the central role as the body in charge of organising and promoting the activities hundreds of individuals, institutions and associations plan round the flame.
This ritual began in 1955, on the initiative of Francesc Pujades, who lived in Arles de Tec (Arles sur Tech). Inspired by "Canigó", the famous poem by Jacint Verdaguer, he got the idea of lighting fires at the top of the mountain for Sant Joan and spreading the flame around. The custom spread rapidly and in 1966 it crossed the border with France for the first time, reaching Vic. Despite Franco's dictatorship, the tradition gradually spread to all the Catalan-speaking lands, symbolising the survival of the country's culture.

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On this day in 1923 Spanish Dictator Rivera banned the Catalan Language

On September 13^th 1923, the Spanish army, led by the putschist Primo Rivera took over the power. The King Alfonso XIII sided with the army and gave the coup credibility by naming de Rivera Prime Minister. Alfonso XIII was the great grandfather of the present day "king" imposed by another Dictator, Franco. De Rivera dissolved the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – and he placed the country under martial law. Newspapers were strictly censored and those that were allowed to print asked for the country to rally around de Rivera with the call for “Country, Religion, Monarchy”. De Rivera played the Spanis imperialist card with some success portraying politicians as weak and unpatriotic while the army represented all that Spainshould have been proud of. He created a Directory that consisted of eight senior military commanders with himself as President.

One of the aims of Rivera was to end with the Catalan people resistance. Among other repressive laws in October 27th 1923 he imposed  the banning of the Catalan language at all levels.

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Galicians protest the Spanish Supremacism of a Galician Government officer

A Mesa pola Normalización protested yesterday in Lugo. They denounced the events of February 26 when Adela Figueroa suffered the Spanish supremacism of a Xunta (Galician autonomous government) official who refused to attend her language. Under the slogan "We have our own language, we want to live in it", the movement denounced that she refused to understand Galician and said that "Spanish is much better than Galician or Catalan." The same officer proudly said that she had been member of Phalange, a Fascist party which is legal in Spain. The same state where to vote in a Democratic Referendum is illegal. 

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“No one forces you to speak Galician”

I always try to avoid conflicts that are condemned to gridlock from the start. But sometimes when I hear absurd things I have to respond to them.

I’m not against any language or nation, but I can’t stand hate speech and absurd phrases that are put in the heads of simple-minded people. The maxims they repeat later, even if they sound funny, can be dangerous.

Even though the following conversation I had with a Galician is pretty common, it still makes me think about things a little:

Someone approached me and asked me a question that I didn’t understand. He seemed to be a normal guy and really seemed to have a question. I could not have known that he was Galician. I guess that’s not something that I could guess by looking at his hairstyle or the way his lips moved when he said certain words, because I’m not Sherlock Holmes.

I politely told him that I hadn’t understood him and I asked if he could repeat his question. Without thinking, I asked him this in Catalan, because it’s the language I usually use around here. It had never crossed my mind that the words I spoke out of politeness were rather like bait for a fish—a fish full of hate and frustration toward the culture that this man was in the midst of.

“You make me speak Catalan,” he started to shout. “In Galicia we don’t make anyone speak Galician and here you always make everyone speak Catalan.”

“Who makes you?” I tried to figure out where his problem was coming from, but the man was just shouting and it was impossible to have a fruitful conversation.

“Speak to me in Galician or Mandarin if you know it, because the more languages we know, the richer we become.” I tried calming him down but there was no way to communicate with him, because he just kept repeating the same words. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders and I left, so we wouldn’t waste our time.

I regret not having pressed him to give me an answer to my question about who was making him speak Catalan (all Catalans, I guess...) and how exactly they were pushing him around to speak it. I surmise that neither the obligation nor the pressure to speak Catalan were very onerous, because this Galician man didn’t seem to know a single Catalan word, not even for a courteous gesture or a rude insult.

Anita Janczak

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Spanish Consulate in Brussels refused to process legal document written in Catalan

 Spanish government justifies this and defends the use of a security guard to "escort away" the citizen who had requested it

CNA Madrid | 

José Manuel García-Margallo / EFE 

Consulates, diplomatic missions, or Spanish consular offices in general are not expected to process documents submitted by citizens and directed to the justice administration that have been written in a co-official language, not even if the court to which it is addressed is located where that language is spoken. This is how the Spanish government justified the incident that took place on March 6 this year at the Spanish General Consulate in Brussels, when civil servants refused to process a document submitted by a Catalan citizen and addressed to a court in Sabadell (Catalonia), because it was written in Catalan rather than Spanish.

The case has surfaced because of the reply to a written inquiry sent to the Spanish government by Jordi Xuclà, a CiU MP in Madrid’s parliament. In the letters, to which the Catalan News Agency has had access, Xuclà asked why on March 6 the Consulate in Brussels refused to process a document submitted by a Catalan citizen living in Brussels, addressed to a court of law in Sabadell "simply because it was written in Catalan". The procedure requested of the consular employee consisted solely of verifying the identity of the citizen, registering the receipt of the document, and forwarding it to the Sabadell courthouse.

According to the testimony of the citizen, the behavior of the civil servant who dealt with him was absolutely fine until he noticed that the document was written in Catalan --even though he had no reason to read it. At that moment, according to what Xuclà reported in his inquiry, he was told that they could not accept it and ordered to leave. Even though the citizen explained that it was an urgent matter and asked the employee to check with his supervisor, the civil servant "refused" to comply with the request "and told a security guard to escort him out of the office".

In its response, the Spanish government justified the behavior of this civil servant, claiming that the fact that the document was addressed to a court, and not to a public administration, "excluded it from the jurisdiction of administrative law", which includes the right to submit texts written in co-official languages, and meant that it fell under the laws of civil court proceedings. 

According to the Rajoy administration, the contents of the laws of judicial procedure state that "the use of an official language other than Spanish is only admissible in those proceedings that take place, and in the documents that are presented, before the organs of the Justice Administration located in the territory of the Autonomous Community where that language is official". 

The Spanish government argues that, in this case, the procedure requested "was not a mere registration, but of a different nature" and "it required consulate to know the contents of the document submitted", because "a legal report regarding the document had to be issued and addressed to a judicial organ". For this reason, they claimed, "the interested party was asked to produce a text written in Spanish, the official working language of Consular offices in Spain and abroad".

The Spanish government also justified the use of the security guard. According to their response, the civil servant who attended to the citizen "asked the guard to accompany the party in question to a waiting room so that a supervisor could talk to him later, as he had requested", but "at no point was he expelled from the consulate".

Finally, according to the Spanish government, this same citizen "returned after a few hours to process the transaction before the same consular employee, and following the instructions that he had received".

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