The European Parliament Committee on Petitions held a hearing this week to discuss a 2017 petition opposing Catalan language immersion, presented by a petitioner connected with the People’s Party. Taking part in the hearing as an alleged expert in linguistic matters was a far-right VOX member of the Parliament of Catalonia

The Petitions Committee of the European Parliament held a hearing this week on a petition that was presented in 2017 in which a citizen denounced an alleged violation of her linguistic rights because she could not send her children to school in Spanish in Catalonia.

A year later, in 2018, the European Commission stated that the case does not come under European competencies. As pointed out by Esquerra Republicana MEP Diana Riba, “the natural decision of the Petitions Committee should have been to shelve this petition, as it always does in such cases.” Still, 5 years later “the petition is still open and is even being debated in committee hearings to the benefit of the political agenda of the Spanish right and far right,” censured Esquerra’s spokeswoman.

The petitioner is Ana Losada, who in 2011 stood as a candidate in the municipal elections for the People’s Party in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a suburb of Barcelona. “So we are talking about yet another ruse by the Spanish right to attack the Catalan language and to instrumentalize the European institutions,” lamented spokeswoman Diana Riba.

Esquerra’s representative recalls that the presidency of the committee is in the hands of Dolors Montserrat “who has turned the committee into an echo chamber for the most reactionary Spanish right-wing where they debate for the most part those political issues that are in their political benefit.” “If Dolors Montserrat had the slightest respect for the European chamber, she would resign as the chair of the committee,” stressed Ms Riba.

Despite the futility of the petition, the committee controlled by Ms Montserrat decided to organize a hearing with alleged experts to debate and analyse the alledged violations of linguistic rights. The panel featured four speakers, three of whom were proposed by the People’s Party and one by far-right VOX. “This goes against the plurality that the hearings in the European chamber are always meant to epitomise” said Ms Riba. However, the scandal goes further, since one of the ostensible experts was Manuel Acosta Elías, a member of the Parliament of Catalonia for the far-right party, VOX.

That is why the MEPs of the Greens/ALE, the Social Democrats and the European Left decided not to participate in what Diana Riba did not waver in calling a “circus” and they left the room.