Acceso usuarios
Bartomeu Colom Pastor
The object of this paper is to analyze the situation of Catalan in the administration of justice in the Balearic Islands. To this end, the author examines the set of rules regulating the use of the two official languages in this domain and the standardization of Catalan. This set of standards is made up of the Constitution, the Statute of Autonomy, the Language Standardization Act, the Judiciary Act and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The author concludes that the status derived from Article 231 of the Judiciary Act with respect to Catalan is halfway between that of an official government language and a foreign language. This is so because public servants do not have the obligation to be familiar with Catalan, citizens can assert their lack of knowledge of the language and proceedings in Catalan within the government itself are supposed to be translated. All of this contradicts the provisions of the Statute of Autonomy and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Normalization is an unresolved issue in this administration in this autonomous community, and an improvement of the situation may be achieved through the removal of those obstacles that prevent the citizenry from exercising their linguistic rights. Advancement may also come about through legislative reforms, chief among which would be requiring judges, magistrates and other public servants working for the judiciary to have a knowledge of the autochthonous languages of each autonomous community.
