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French Senate buries ratification of European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages
Most right-wing senators block government bill to amend the Constitution · Les Republicains party argues the proposal threatened French national unity
The European Charter had been signed by the French government in 1999, but its ratification has been pending ever since. A constitutional bill had been introduced by the French ministry of Justice in July 2015 in order to amend the Constitution by introducing a new article explicitly allowing the ratification of the Charter.
But conservative senators opposed such a bill. Les Republicains party (former UMP) argues that ratifying the Charter would amount to breaking the unity of the French nation and to introducing "communitarianism" into the Constitution. Furthermore, the conservatives say that having French as "the language of the republic" and, at the same time, opening the door for the official use of other languages would be a contradiction.
65 leftist senators -most of them Breton, Alsatian and Occitan, led by Breton pro-autonomy Paul Molac- had earlier released an op-ed in which they asked other senators to take on their "responsibility for the future of France's linguistic heritage" and to vote for the government-proposed constitutional bill. Their text recalled that "almost all of those languages" are considered as endangered by UNESCO, and demanded that "the current constitutional corset" that "hinders initiatives and wishes of local communities" be lifted.
The ministry of Justice argued that the French government sought to grant citizens the right to use "regional or minority languages," which should be protected in the areas of "education, justice, public services, media, cultural activities and events, and economic and social life."