SENTENCE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF JUSTICE (abstract)

The sentence of the Supreme Court of Justice, issued in Madrid on the 25th of September, 2000, answers to the appeal submitted by the A Coruña City Hall against the sentence issued on the 28th of July, 1994, by the High Court of Galicia. The latter sentence allowed the appeal brought by the organization Mesa pola normalización lingüística through which the aforementioned city hall was required to recognize and use the name A Coruña as the official one, instead of La Coruña, as well as to make use of the Galician language in all official orders (notice of meetings, orders of the day, motions, individual votes, proposals of agreement, commission reports and minutes), without any prejudice to the use of Spanish.

Its foundations are grounded on the one hand on the 5/88 law of the Galician parliament on the use of the official language by local bodies, on the Spanish constitution, which establishes for Galician the juridical status of co-official language, and above all, the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia, in which the Galician language is stated to be the community's own language, that is to say, it concerns a special juridical consideration in relation to the language's nature as an agent of political identity. Finally, this sentence gathers the principle of the autonomous law which, in the case of placenames, gives preference to the use of Galician, while adducing the role of the Autonomous Community itself in the process of linguistic normalization.

The new sentence agrees again with the Mesa pola normalización lingüística and dismisses the appeal submitted by the city hall.

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