Plataforma per la Llengua made its contribution at the UN Forum on Minority Issues, held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva (Switzerland), on Thursday 27 November, calling on the United Nations to urge States and digital platforms to recognise hate speech for language reasons as a form of discrimination, and for the United Nations to include language rights in its social cohesion policies. The organisation has denounced the hate suffered by many Catalan-speakers for using their language both on the internet and in everyday life, and has called on the institutions to solve the problem.
In her speech to the Forum, Maria de Lluc Muñoz, Plataforma per la Llengua's officer responsible for international affairs, asked the UN rapporteur for minorities, Nicolas Levrat, to ensure that social media moderation systems understand and protect minoritised languages. She also urged him to support initiatives to help communities use their languages with security and confidence, both in public life and on digital platforms.
The organisation considers that dealing with hate speech must form part of any serious strategy for promoting peaceful coexistence in diverse societies and calls on institutions, digital platforms and civil society to work together to ensure that structural discrimination against certain groups does not worsen and is not reproduced in areas like the internet or in everyday life.
As a representative of Plataforma per la Llengua, Muñoz reminded the Forum that, for minoritised language communities, public spaces and online platforms, should be places for participation, expression and intercultural dialogue. However, language diversity is often the target of attacks. Catalan-speakers, like many other minoritised language communities, regularly suffer harassment, insults and hate speech simply for using their language in everyday interactions and on social media. These attacks do not occur in isolation: they reinforce old prejudices, delegitimise our identities and generate a climate of fear that disincentivises the normal use of language. For Plataforma per la Llengua, protecting minoritised languages is a key step towards achieving more inclusive, secure, peaceful societies.
18th session of the Forum on Minority Issues
The Forum on Minority Issues is organised every year and is intended promote dialogue and cooperation on issues relating to national, ethnic, religious and language minorities, as well collecting proposals to improve the international protection of these communities.
This year's Forum looked in depth at the contribution of minorities to constructive more diverse, resilient, peaceful societies. As well as Plataforma per la Llengua, Razvan Rusu, vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council; Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Nicolas Levrat, the UN rapporteur for minorities, all took part. Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones and Davyth Hicks, president and general secretary of the European Language Equality Network (ELEN), a European organisation of which Plataforma per la Llengua is a member, also attended.
Levrat will summarise the contributions made by all the organisations a set of demands and recommendations which he will present to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
