4. INTERNATIONAL AUXILIARY LANGUAGE

The importance of an auxiliary language that is not a vehicle of cultural hegemony in the global village of telecommunications, and that has truly universal characteristics of simplicity to use and learn, is ever more urgent.

From an economic point of view, it is to be noted that the cost of translation and interpretation relative to the international bodies, for example, and the assemblies of the UN and the European Parliament, as well as for internal communications, reach a cost of thirty percent of the total budgets of these organizations. Every attempt to simplify linguistic communication by adopting one or few languages from among those already existing, has failed because of the opposition of the excluded languages.

The TRP has chosen Esperanto as the language that is best suited to satisfy the above mentioned exigencies. A campaign for the experimentation of Esperanto, conducted together with the TRP federated "Esperanto Radikala Associo," obtained the approval and partial financing in 1994 from UNESCO for a project for the teaching of Esperanto in hundreds of schools in about twenty nations. Appeals and projects for the resolution, which were presented in various institutions, have gained the recognition of Pope John Paul II who, on Easter and Christmas of 1994, gave his traditional greetings, for the first time that year and in every subsequent year, in Esperanto.

Actually, under initiative of the ERA, the European commission has approved an information campaign on the costs of communication in Europe. In June of 1996, the TRP requested of the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) the adoption of the international auxiliary language Esperanto in the UN. The document is being examined by the Presidency of the ECOSOC, which will ultimately decide whether or not to include it. Together with UEA (Universal Esperanto Asocio), a campaign is in course to sustain the ECOSOC proposal, which includes a UN seminar in New York and a conference at the European Parliament in Brussels.

The European Parliament has recently proposed a recommendation which, in sight of the future growth of the European Community, solicits the use of Esperanto as a bridge language in the systems of translation and interpretation and as a juridical language. They also emphasize the priority of teaching Esperanto as a second language in all of the schools of the European Union.