International Organizations which have an increasing central role in worldly choices, have to face increasing costs to guarantee the dissemination in the official languages of their works to the International community. The globalization of politics, as well as markets, provide the opportunity of choosing a means of communication that could facilitate, while reducing at the same time the inherent costs, the exchange of opinions like that of goods. The International community has used, for historical reasons, mainly two national languages, "imposing" them upon the rest of the world. They were natural languages the fruit of precise and defined cultures and traditions, which not only have imposed their phonemes or lexicon, but also their socio-cultural model, traditions and expressions.

THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

The European Union today counts fifteen countries, and the official languages in the plenary sessions and in the documents of European Parliament are eleven: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch and Swedish. The cost relative to the translations and interpretations, in the various combinations of languages, equals 40% of the budget of the Parliament. The eventual eastern extension of the Union, with the addition of other twelve countries with different languages and alphabets, will complicate the combination and increase the spending for translations and interpretations up to the half of the budget of the European institutions.

THE UNITED NATIONS

At the United Nations the official languages are six: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. The costs to grant the interpretations and the dissemination of texts in the six languages nears 20% of the budget.

The change of the International political scenario of the last decade, the technological revolution and the increasing interest of politics in the International organizations lead us to take into consideration the linguistic problem: How is it possible to guarantee equal opportunities of expression to the citizens of the world within the International institutions? Hasn't the time come to hypothesize the use of an International auxiliary language? A language that does not belong to anybody, but at the same time grants the opportunity to its users of expressing themselves totally; a neutral, perfect, simple and easy to use language.

ADVANTAGES

It is our opinion that a language with the abovementioned qualities could bring important changes to the international institutions both at the political and technical level. It could:

- guarantee equal access opportunities to the institutions;

- guarantee to all member states the possibility to express themselves - keeping in that way the nuances of the language that constitute the richest and most significant part of an idiom;

- limit translations and interpretation costs, through the use of an auxiliary language as a "bridge" language in the passages from one language to another;

- guarantee the transparency and non "modification" of technical texts during the translation process, avoiding misunderstandings and waste of time on revision.

PROPOSAL

We are deeply convinced that international institutions can trigger the reflection upon linguistic rights beginning from their highest level. The official languages of the United Nations are spoken by less than half of the planet. It is an organization whose decisions have global effects, and which cannot avoid that those decisions should be accessible to all those who will be bound by them.

- We ask that the Committee on NGO recommend to the ECOSOC assembly that an item titled "International Auxiliary Language" be put on its agenda; the consideration of such an item will not involve any new budget-line.

- The eventual experimental adoption of such an item will significantly reduce the costs related to translations and interpretations in the passages from one language to another of the Commission itself.

A PATH TOWARDS COMMUNICATION

We need to inform, educate and involve the international institutions and commit them to the necessity of a right to language, a language that we believe could be Esperanto. It is a communication tool that could allow the citizens of the world to have equal access to the international institutions. The path towards the right to language will involve all those who are committed to the cause in a lobbying effort at the regional as well as international level, a mobilization that will make decision-makers aware of the necessity and the costs of a global communication.