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Aureli Argemí's speech at the 14th plenary meeting of the UN Human Rights Council

Video available in English and in Spanish.

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The Bible tells us that those who tried to build the famous Tower of Babel as high as they could, thus demonstrating their desire for perfection, failed. They failed because they spoke a multitude of languages and couldn't understand each other. The event was, if you like, a metaphor for the process of globalization where what was lacking in the builders was the mutual respect for difference and equality. Nowadays, in the years of globalization, I wonder whether the different languages that exist, do they unite us or divide us?

I'm addressing you all in Spanish, although my mother tongue is Catalan, which is not, as Spanish is, a working language of this institution. EBLUL, which I represent here, uses as its working languages English and French. I live therefore, like most of you do I'm sure, in a multilingual context. Is multilingualism a factor for union? It is if we are able to distinguish between the value of languages as an expression of identity of each individual and of their respective linguistic communities, and the functions of certain languages that have a role as international communication languages.

We are in the last part of 2008, the International Year of Languages, proclaimed by the United Nations. What has the Human Rights Council done in order to celebrate this? We believe that you could draw up a document protecting the human right that each individual has to speak his or her own language. As you know, there are very important shortcomings in this area. The language question is often invoked in many areas to feed into discrimination rather than fomenting peaceful linguistic coexistence.

Aware of this issue, hundreds of bodies from civil society back in 1996 approved the Universal Declaration on Language Rights. Its content and purposes, as you will see in the documents that we have given you in NGO/6 serve us as a platform and we would ask you to draft your own document on the human right of each individual to their own language. That would contribute to slowing down the trend we are seeing to the rapid disappearance of so many languages because people do not have the protection they would have were these rights seen in terms of human rights and human ecology.

We believe that this responsibility is incumbent on the Human Rights Council because, although languages must be considered in the context of culture, and may therefore fall within the ambit of UNESCO, languages do not have rights; but individuals, they have linguistic rights. For this reason, we commonly distinguish between languages and cultures.

There is an exceptional opportunity since we are in the middle of the International Year of Languages. We would ask the Advisory Committee be tasked with a work which could perhaps culminate in a UN Declaration on linguistic rights, which would be a complement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Aureli Argemí
Geneva, September 17, 2008