Article 27 of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, of 1976, and the recent Declaration on the rights of persons, including linguistic minorities, approved by the U.N. General Assembly on 21 February 1992, confirm the right of people belonging to linguistic minorities to use their own language. On 15 December 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada, in the cases of Ford and Devin; the Human Rights Committee, in the Québec case on 31 March 1993; the Constitutional Council of France, in a recent linguistic decision taken on 29 July 1994, stated that freedom of expression includes the implicit and general right to freely use any language, and therefore the right to language. In order to effectively guarantee such a right within the sphere of nations and at the international level it is necessary to promote and diffuse an auxiliary international language, such as Esperanto. Esperanto does not compete with other languages, as Latin and French did first, as English does today, and who knows which la
nguage will tomorrow. Esperanto is an auxiliary language whose promotion and diffusion would guarantee the right to language as a fundumental right that is a part of human nature.
For this reason, we, members of the European Parliament, ask that:
the European Institutions:
- conduct an indepth European study on the cost to the user-consumer, to businesses and to European development of linguistic noncommunication between citizens of the Union; and a further European study on the prospects for Esperanto as a Federal language, including eventual phasing in;
- carry out the necessary research and steps for Esperanto to become the official juridical language of the European Union;
- promote the use of Esperanto as a means of learning foreign languages more quickly and perfectly and, above all within their own spheres, the use of Internacia Lingvo as a "bridge language" where interpretational facilities are lacking;
- adequatley finance an Esperanto teaching and learning experiment in Europe, checking and communicating the results.
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Name Surname Political group Signature
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