Language Rights Charter: France In The ‘Naughty Corner’ With Russia!

NEWS FROM THE CELTIC LEAGUE

The decision by the French Senate to once again refuse to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages once again brings the Charter designed to protect the linguistic and cultural rights of minorities in Nation States into focus.

Link here to Eurolang who call the French senate’s decision a breathtaking disgrace:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php…

Most countries have signed and ratified the Charter. However some have just signed it and sometimes there can be a good reason for that. Ireland for example has not ratified because Irish is the first language of the State and not a minority language (Michael Noonan TD and Enda Kenny might like to dwell on that next time they are fixing budget priorities).

Council of Europe link here shows the current table of agreement and ratification;

http://www.coe.int/…/fu…/-/conventions/treaty/148/signatures

However other countries notably France, Italy and Russia have signed but not ratified because they don’t recognise the linguistic and cultural rights of the minorities currently within their borders.

France you could say is in the ‘naughty corner’ with Putin’s Russia.

Strangely the ambivalence of these large States is somewhat hypocritical. Russia for example is aggressively defensive of its linguistic minorities within other States and several indeed have protected their Russian minorities (such as Serbia, Belarus and Ukraine) by ratification.

Similarly France from and International perspective is extremely defensive of its own language and periodically rails against anglicisation of it.

However France really can’t expect its bleating about the erosion of its own language’s status to be taken seriously whilst it continues to fail to guarantee via ratification the many minority languages, including Breton, within its current borders

BERNARD MOFFATT

Issued by: The Celtic News

15/10/15

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