Is there a record of the number of times the devices have been used? co-official languages in the plenary session of the Senate during the last legislature? The simple answer is ‘no’. Now, from the Upper House they add a nuance: “No. It’s so normalized that no one has considered it”. The only formula to be able to verify this is to review one by one the more than 70 plenary sessions of the last four years. A quick glance allows us to verify that the co-official languages are used regularly and without the commotion that has generated the commitment of the recently elected president of Congress, Francina Armengolto try to implement this measure in the lower house.
Without much fuss, the senators from the ERC and Junts, mainly, and those from the PNV and EH Bildu, to a lesser extent, come down in each plenary session of their benches, go up to the speakers’ rostrum and deliver their speeches in Catalan or Basque. The rest of the senators, from their seats, listen live, through some headphonesto the translators. The press, or any citizen who wishes to see the debate, also listens to the superimposed voice of these interpreters. no one is shocked anymore in the upper house.
Currently, senators have the right to use any of the co-official languages included in the autonomy statutes -Catalan, Basque and Galician-, although with limitations. Mainly, they can only do it in the fullnever in the ordinary commissions, and to defend the motions. That is, only those texts whose purpose is for the Chamber to rule on a matter, but lack legislative effects. In the debate on propositions or bills, the use of the Castilian.
29 years on the way
Getting to this point has not been easy. they have been late 29 years to walk that path. The first step was taken in 1994, when the Senate regulations were modified so that the three languages could be used in the first intervention of the president-elect of the Chamber; in the debates on the state of the autonomies in the General Commission of the Autonomous Communities; and in the writings sent by citizens or institutions.
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The next change occurred in 2005, when these assumptions were extended to any debate in the General Commission of the Autonomous Communities and to the publication of non-legislative initiatives, provided they were also presented in Spanish. “The implementation of these first reforms, and very singularly the implementation of a system of simultaneous translation (…), have been very positive“, they affirmed five years later, when taking the step to allow the current situation. It was even claimed that multilingualism “enriches and favors a climate of freedom, normality and, ultimately, democratic coexistence“.
The cost
The 2010 reform, which made it possible to defend the motions in Catalan, Galician and Basque, was approved by 133 senators -those from the PSOE and nationalist parties- and had the vote against 115 parliamentarians -the PP and UPN-. Since then, the Senate has allocated around 300,000 euros per year for the hiring of 25 translators who interpret the speeches live and later transcribe the interventions into Spanish. In the last legislature, the ERC and Junts senators have been the ones who have made the most use of this right, while those of EH Bildu and PNV have limited it to those debates on Euskadi. Also, in 2021, the post-convergents tried to implement a new reform so that these languages could be used at any time. Although it was accepted for processing, the initiative ended up forgotten in a drawer.