The Supreme Court overturns the veto on Castilian in school signs in Catalonia

The Supreme Court has annulled the instruction of the Generalitat that excluded Castilian from the signs and posters of public and subsidized schools and institutes in Catalonia. The Contentious-Administrative Chamber considers that an Administration cannot remove a co-official language from its communications with citizens and concludes that the measure violates the linguistic framework established by the Constitution.

The ruling affects the organization and operation instructions approved by the Department of Education for the 2022-2023 academic year. That document established that the signage of school spaces should be done in Catalan, in Occitan within Arán and, when appropriate, in Catalan sign language. The rest of the languages were limited to works prepared by students.

The sentence upholds the appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School in Catalonia, with the support of the Public Prosecutor's Office, and corrects the decision of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia. The Catalan high court had annulled other sections of the instructions, but maintained the one related to signs, understanding that the signage of buildings was outside educational activity.

Posters are also part of teaching

The Supreme Court rejects this separation between what happens inside the classroom and the physical space surrounding the students. For the magistrates, education includes the knowledge transmitted, the materials used, and the daily environment in which school life develops.

Walls, signs, and posters constitute the "scenario" or "landscape" of teaching. The language that appears on them influences the image of the educational system that students receive and the effective recognition of official languages within the centers.

"It is not the same, for the purposes of the vision of things transmitted to students, a physical space where signs and posters are only in one of the two languages of the corresponding autonomous community," the resolution states.

The court adds that removing Castilian from these spaces restricts its normal presence as a vehicular language. This is the first time that the Supreme Court directly establishes its criterion on linguistic signage within schools and institutes, although it had previously resolved similar conflicts in other areas.

Co-official status prevents erasing one of the languages

The decision is mainly based on article 3 of the Constitution, which recognizes Castilian as an official language throughout the State and allows other Spanish languages to also be official in their respective autonomous communities.

The magistrates recall that the orientation signs of a public building are a form of communication between the Administration and the people who access it. Public schools and institutes are therefore subject to the co-officiality regime and cannot receive instructions that completely eliminate one of the official languages.

The Supreme Court also points out that this exclusion could lead to an unjustified difference in treatment for linguistic reasons, contrary to the principle of equality set forth in article 14. As these are educational centers, the Chamber also incorporates the right to education recognized by article 27.

The practical scope of the ruling requires clarification. The sentence annuls the rule that prevented the use of Castilian, but does not order that every sign in all centers must obligatorily appear in both languages. The Generalitat loses the ability to impose exclusively Catalan signage and will have to adapt its next instructions to the framework set by the Supreme Court.

A ruling different from the 25% conflict

The dispute intersects with the long judicial confrontation over the presence of Castilian in Catalan classrooms, although it resolves a different issue. The resolutions on the well-known 25% analyzed the vehicular use of languages during teaching. This procedure refers to signs, signals, walls, and other visible elements of school buildings.

Precisely this difference led the TSJC to maintain the instruction of the Generalitat. The Supreme Court now concludes that signage cannot be isolated from the educational project nor be outside the constitutional guarantees that protect co-officiality.

The Assembly for a Bilingual School has demanded that the Ministry of Education immediately apply the ruling and modify the guidelines addressed to the centers. The entity maintains that the ruling potentially affects 5,433 publicly funded schools and institutes, a figure that the Generalitat itself would have handled during the procedure.

Junts has reacted by accusing Salvador Illa's Government of adopting a position of "resignation" in the face of judicial resolutions affecting Catalan. Its parliamentary president, Mònica Sales, has demanded a political response and has reproached the PSC for limiting itself to applying the decisions of the courts.

The Department of Education must now modify the linguistic instructions that regulate school spaces and communicate to the centers how to execute the ruling. The sentence leaves the specific labeling formula in their hands, but closes the door to any directive that again generally excludes Spanish.