A/HRC/43/47/Add.2 different parts of the country that individuals are simply told to comply with the chosen use of the national language”; again, there are no specific references to these reports, so they cannot be consulted. Notwithstanding the advisability of implementing the amendments that the Special Rapporteur proposes with regard to this issue in paragraph 55, it would be prudent for the wording of the recommendation to indicate that the approval of legislative amendments corresponds to the Parliament, and not to the Government of Spain. 16. Paragraph 56: “…the Rapporteur received consistent reports of the members of the Galician-speaking minority unable to use their own language despite the apparent right to do so with public authorities in the region.” There are no references to these reports, and the statement is not supported by any data. 17. End of paragraph 59: “In some other Autonomous Communities such as Galicia …, it was argued that existing educational schemes were insufficient either to effectively guarantee minority children could be educated in the co-official minority language.” Once again, this is a statement that does not appear to be backed up by any facts. Nevertheless, the Government of Galicia has provided the following figures, taken from surveys on the knowledge of Galician carried out every five years, from which it is impossible to draw the same conclusions set forth by the Special Rapporteur in his Report: 1. Language skills 2. 2013 3. 2018 4. Understan ding 5. 95.83% 6. 95.46% 7. Speaking 8. 86.75% 9. 88.05% 10. Reading 11. 84.77% 12. 85.05% 13. Writing 14. 83.32% 15. 86.79% 18. Section VII. B (Language rights) of the Report includes several references to the situation in the Balearic Islands, Valencia and Navarre with regard to issues that fall under the authority of the Autonomous Communities. However, the Rapporteur held no meetings with representatives of the governments of these Autonomous Communities. Notwithstanding the value of the information that the Rapporteur was able to obtain from civil society organizations and other sources, it does not appear appropriate for such information to be included in the Report without any discussion of these issues with representatives of these regional governments. For this reason, the elimination of these comments with regard to those particular Autonomous Communities is requested. 19. Equally striking is the quotation of several paragraphs from the 2017 publication Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation (paragraphs 52, 62 and 64 of the Report), without putting them into the context of the situation in Spain. By citing that publication, the Rapporteur implies that the instructions included therein were not being followed in Spain—when the exact opposite is true, at least with regard to the content of the quoted paragraphs. This must be made clear in his Report. 20. The Fifth Report of the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on compliance with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) was approved on 5 October 2019. That report included an in-depth analysis of Spain’s compliance with every aspect of the ECRML: laws, actions, and real-world practice, all based on official sources— whether from the Spanish State or the Autonomous Communities—and on information obtained directly from civil society organizations. Examining the charts contained in the Report, it can be clearly seen that Spain’s level of compliance with all of the articles of the ECRML is very high, and that in those cases where difficulties were found, the public 5

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