The TSJC obliges to distribute the exams in Catalan and Spanish

The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has partially canceled the instructions from the Interuniversitari Council of Catalonia (CIC) regarding the selectivity tests of 2021 by violation of rights fundamentals of students. In a sentence made public this Wednesday, the court considers it contrary to law the preference for the Catalan language in the distribution of the exercises to the detriment of the Spanish and Aranese language. In the last edition of June the selectivity, the TSJC, attending a demand of the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia (AEB), has already issued precautionary measures to force the Generalitat to offer the exams both in Catalan and in Spanish and Aranese. And in September, it went further and prohibited the identification of students who chose the test in Spanish.

Now, the TSJC upholds the contentious-administrative appeal filed by the AEB against the aforementioned instructions and declares the third paragraph of section 1.2.2 null and void. of the instructions of the CIC that forced the members of the courts of the PAAU to first hand out the statements of the exam in Catalan, and only do it in the Spanish version if any of the students expressly requests it. The sentence therefore confirms that the exams must be distributed in Catalan, Spanish and Aranese. The effects of this ruling will already affect the next calls for university entrance exams, the first of which in June (days 14, 15 and 16).

As soon as the content of the judgment is known, the Department of Universities has pointed out that does not rule out filing an appeal and that, in any case, he will organize the PAU “with the students in the center, as always”. In a statement, the ‘conselleria’ that directs Gemma Geis ensures that they have “always” guaranteed the right of students to choose the language in which they want to take the exam. “They can choose the statement and they can choose the language in which they answer the exams,” they recall. And he points out that “it is proven that a student has never been asked to identify himself.” He adds that Catalan is the language mostly chosen by students, with percentages of 95%.

The sentence declares that the rights of the students must be prioritized (“they are superior”) to the organizational interests of the Educational Administration. He considers that students do not have to express their language choice in public in a context such as carrying out an exercise (university entrance exams) that conditions their academic, professional and vital future. Likewise, the court criticizes the CIC for having forgotten in the instructions the possibility of offering the exercises in the Aranese language.

Against the precautionary measures of the TSJC, the Platform for the Language and the Universities of Barcelona, ​​Girona and Politècnica de Catalunya appeared to support the CIC theses.

The AEB has underlined that the sentence “favors the exercise of the linguistic rights of all Catalan students without discrimination based on language” and hopes that both the university authorities and the Department of Universitats “issue instructions favorable to linguistic coexistence that do not violate the fundamental rights of students” in the next edition of the Selectividad.

The president of the AEB, Ana Losada, has expressed her satisfaction not only with the sentence, which proves them right, but also because the Chamber has “expressly recognized active legitimation to the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia since it considers that the regulation of the PAAU affects the scope of interests of the appellant and it would be an excessive formalism and contrary to the Constitution not to admit the legitimacy of this Association as representative of the collective interests of its members such as the defense of the users of the public education system”. Losada stresses that this recognition of the legitimacy of the entity is “an accolade” in the other battle that they have opened by asking, as “affected person”, the TSJC the forced execution of the sentence that obliges Catalan educational centers to teach 25% of classes in Spanish. The AEB has also appeared as “affected person” in defense of the model of linguistic conjunction in the execution of the sentence that recognizes the right to the education of at least 25% of teaching as vehicular language in Spanish and Catalan.