They denounce to Europe the dismissal of a musician by the Barcelona City Council for not knowing Catalan

Victor Mondelo Barcelona

Barcelona

Updated Friday, January 19, 2024-19:48

The dismissal of the Andalusian musician from the Barcelona Municipal Band for not being able to prove the required level of Catalan was reported yesterday to the European Labor Authority by Ciudadanos.

After EL MUNDO revealed that the City Council yesterday dismissed this clarinetist after 27 years working in the city band for lacking the C1 level of Catalan, the liberal MEP

Jordi Cañas

sent letters to the Commissioner of the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, and to the Authority European Labor Organization pointing out that in Catalonia the European right to free movement of workers is not being guaranteed, alleging that "Spanish-speaking citizens are discriminated against on linguistic grounds and are denied the right to work within the borders of a Member State that has "Spanish recognized as an official language within the entire national territory."

Last year, the MEP denounced the case of the young nurse from the Catalan Health Service who was persecuted for having publicly criticized the requirement of Catalan to be able to work and who was expelled by the Generalitat.

Cañas now also demands that the European authorities investigate the new known cases and prevent this violation of fundamental rights, such as using the official language and one's own language, from persisting.

In addition to the musician from the Barcelona Municipal Band, 11 other interim members of the City Council have been fired for not meeting the linguistic requirements demanded in the merit contest with which it was intended to stabilize their position to comply with European regulations.

In this sense, the president of the PP in the City Council, Daniel Sirera, criticized that "people who in many cases have been working in the City Council for more than 20 years are fired, without any justification and exclusively for ideological reasons."

«Catalan should be a merit, not an excuse to send you to unemployment.

These workers belong to areas in which Catalan is not needed for day-to-day work," said the popular one.

For its part, Vox will take the issue to the next municipal plenary session of Barcelona, ​​which will take place on January 26.

In the session, the group led by

Gonzalo de Oro

will demand from the socialist mayor, Jaume Collboni, the reinstatement of the interims.

"It is surreal and a mockery that to play the clarinet in the municipal band you need to speak Catalan," said De Oro, who called the dismissal of the musician and the rest of the interim workers affected a "sectarian and disproportionate decision."

"It responds to the separatist campaign that turns language into a political weapon and seeks to carry out linguistic purges in the Catalan public administrations, without taking into account the functions and seniority of the worker," added the Vox representative in the City Council.

Barcelona City Council emphasizes that the inclusion of Catalan as a "mandatory and eliminatory" requirement in the rules of the competition to which the affected workers had to submit is dictated by the law with which the Generalitat regulated access to the public function.

"The requirement of knowledge of Catalan has been public and known since then," argue sources from the City Council of the Catalan capital.