Ratio Legis on the Right to Language in the Education System in Timor Leste

Abstract

The East Timor obtained its independence though a referendum conducted by the United Nation (UN). The constitution of the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste (RDTL) officially enacted on 20th of May 2002. The language clause with the constitution, article 13 states that the official language of East Timor is Tetun and Portuguese. Based on the language clause mention above, the government of East Timor puts a policy in place, obligated all level of educational system to only use Portuguese in their activity. This policy, however, gets fierce rejection especially from private educational institutions because of its inconsistency with the new reality According to the data from the United Nation (UN), actually, only less than 5 persent of the Timorese speaks Portuguese. in this research, there are 2 legal issues emerged. The first is about the language as a constitutional right of citizens. Secondly, use of Portuguese language in the education system in East Timor to human rights?. To analyze the legal problems, this research utilizes the qualitative and legal method. And, it can be successfully proved that the implementation of language clause of East Timor The government policy does not consider the legal principle of proportionality justice and then to be discriminative for Timorese who use Tetun and other national languages, which are important to be developed by the nation as wel. The conclusion that the use of Portuguese language violated constitutional rights and impedes the quality of education.

Keywords

• language
• education system
• constitution
• human rights.