The future document will carry on from where the Barcelona Declaration (1996) and the Girona Manifesto (2011) left off
Paul Bilbao: “The Protocol we will announce next year is going to be a new milestone.”
Oriol Ramon: “The Donostia Protocol will be the blueprint for a new concept of peaceful coexistence between diverse language communities.”
Carme Arenas: “We must keep up our efforts to get people to see language diversity as enriching, as a great opportunity for multilingual societies. We should support coexistence in equality for all languages regardless of quantitative considerations.”
Today, the 2nd of July, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans hosted a public event organised by the promoters of the Summit on European Language Diversity (SELD) to be held next year in the Basque Country as part of the Donostia, 2016 Cultural Capital programme. The title of the presentation was: “From 1996 to 2016, and from the Barcelona Declaration to the Donostia Protocol: the way forward for implementing language rights.”
A central purpose of the event was to stretch out a bridge between the Universal Declaration of Language Rights (Barcelona, 1996) and the Donostia Protocol due to be announced in 2016 at SELD. Speaking at the presentation on behalf of the Basque language umbrella organisation Kontseilua, its general secretary Paul Bilbao told the audience that the Barcelona Declaration, presented nearly twenty years ago, was a significant milestone: “It’s a document of fundamental importance whenever we talk about citizens’ language rights. And we’re hoping the Protocol presented in Donostia at SELD next year will be a new milestone, a further step from demands towards implementation.”
Oriol Ramon, general secretary of the UDLR Monitoring Committee, added: “With the twentieth anniversary of the Barcelona Declaration coming up, today’s event seeks to move things forward by asserting our engagement with the Donostia Protocol project, which is drawing a lot of interest across Europe. The aim is to empower social entities and to define a new concept of coexistence between different language communities where everyone’s rights are respected equally.”
Also present at today’s event was Carme Arenas, president of Linguapax International and the Catalan PEN, who explained how the Catalan PEN started the process that led to the Girona Manifesto, a decalogue which PEN International approved in 2011 that sums up and fine-tunes the basic points contained in the Barcelona Declaration. In the words of Arenas: “We must keep up our efforts to get people to see language diversity as enriching, as a great opportunity for multilingual societies. We want states to support coexistence in equality for all languages regardless of how many speakers a language has.”The session was hosted by M. Teresa Cabré, the president of the Linguistic Section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. It was also attended by representatives of other entities involved in the creation of the Barcelona Declaration, such as CIEMEN, which is in the SELD project’s Organising Committee, Òmnium Cultural, Plataforma per la Llengua i de l’Institut Català per la Pau, and the Generalitat de Catalunya.
All these participants agreed on the need to move forward from the Barcelona Declaration to the Donostia Protocol. Renewing the spirit of the Barcelona Declaration, the Catalan entities passed on the baton to Donostia on behalf of the commitment declared by European language organisations twenty years ago.
