‘Euro’ spelling row deadlocked

By Anna McLauchlin

Date: 14/10/04

THE argument over the spelling of the word 'euro' in EU legal texts was still deadlocked yesterday (13 October) after Latvia and Hungary rejected a 'take it or leave it' compromise proposal from the Council of Ministers.

"The compromise doesn't meet our concerns," said a Latvian official. "We still insist that we should be allowed to use the Latvian spelling of 'euro' in European treaties," said a Latvian official.

But the Council said it would not propose any further compromise. "We've hit a brick wall," said an EU official. "If this is not agreed then we are left with the ministers' agreement in September that there should be corrections. It would then be up to the European Commission to pursue those member states which do not adhere to the rules just as they would in any situation."

On 12 October, EU ambassadors proposed that all translations of EU treaties would have to spell the name of the single currency in the nominative form as 'euro', but that all other cases could be spelt according to the national language, provided that the stem remained 'eur'. All national legal texts could retain their national spelling. The debate followed an informal agreement by EU finance ministers in September that the word 'euro' should be spelled as such in all languages in order to maintain legal clarity. But Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovenia and Malta protested against the decision, which would see them amending both their accession treaties and the EU constitution. Lithuania even went so far as threatening not to sign the constitution unless the issue was solved. But a Lithuanian official told European Voice that the latest compromise was acceptable to them. "It doesn't make much sense to us, particularly as the constitution is supposed to be brought closer to the! people, but we have accepted it," he said.

But Latvia said it is sticking to its guns. "When it was decided in Madrid that the name of the single currency should be 'euro' no one ever indicated that it was talking about the spelling," said the official. "We have already translated the accession treaty which was accepted and the issue did not come up in the negotiations for the constitutional treaty."

Article reports that no compromise was found on the dispute over the spelling of the single currency in the Constitutional Treaty. Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Hungary and Malta insist on using their respective grammatical forms of 'euro' while EU government leaders had agreed in 1995 that the currency's name was to be 'euro', spelt in the same way in all countries apart from Greece which uses a different alphabet.