From: "E. Keown"
A reliable friend told me that compliance with ISO 10646 is now part of the legal structure of the EU (European Union).
A reliable friend would quote actual evidence.
A more reliable source, with official documents related to European legislation for the languages in the EU (available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Greek, Finnish):
http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/lang/key/legislation_en.html
The last *decisions* in 2003 and 2002 were "resolutions" which are just recommanding measures in a "framework for progress" including an "action plan" for 2004-2006, but even these resolutions are not mandatory.
In the EU, the constraining legislation is made of "directives", which can only enter into application when they are "implemented" (in a timeframe of about 2 years after the directive has been published) by the national legislation of a member country.
Unlike "directives" made by the Commission, the "resolutions" on the opposite are political decisions from the European Parlement that are there to influence the work of the Commission and of member governments, when they will propose legal reforms either at a national level or at the European level, but they do not need to be backed by legal acts.
More importantly, the European Commission recognizes the role of national, regional and local authorities for the preservation and promotion of language diversity (which goes far beyond the only few official languages of the European Union), and the European Union will not substitute to member states but will supplement and support them, through funding programs, especially in the field of education (the "life-long language learning" program, for at least one mother tongue and two other languages).
The program is much more ambicious than the necessary limited set of supported languages for legal and working documents in the EU institutions. For these documents (see EuraLex), there are technical constraints, but these constraints only apply to the internal work of each institution, and have no mandatory impact on EU citizens or organizations or member states. For example, the EU programs DO include the support and funding of education for minority languages, including languages spoken and written by migrants and refugees in Europe, so this covers nearly all modern languages of the world (helped at least within the conditions of other minority languages in member states)...
The other key legal document are the EC and EU Treaties, notably articles 3 and 149 to 151 of the EC Treaty, and article 6 of the EU Treaty; plus article 314 (former 248) of the EC Treaty which lays down the "principles of multilinguism" and article 21 that states that "every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies in one of the languages mentioned in Article 314 and have an answer in the same language."
Other official information about "official languages" in the EU: http://europa.eu.int/comm/scic/thescic/multilingualism_en.htm
The original EC treaty in 1958 only had 4 official working languages: Dutch, French, German and Italian. But it includes now English (added very lately, when UK and Ireland joined the EC), Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Irish Gaelic under the principle that at least one official language of the EC (now EU) must be an official language of the member country (all references I see for now still speak about 11 working languages).
I still wonder if the new 10 EU members required adding some official languages for works in the EU institutions (notably Polish and Hungarian, but also Czech and Slovak, or Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and Maltese), or if the 3 other candidates will request their majority official language too (Bulgarian and Romanian soon, but also Turkish in the discussions starting next year).
[COMMENT: The case of Polish today face to Irish Gaelic is curious, given that Polish is a majority language in one of the largest EU member, and Irish Gaelic is an official but minority language of Ireland (where English is also official), and there are important migrant Polish communities throughout Europe ensuring easier access to translation from/into Polish than from/into Irish.]
In weekly meetings today, only English, French and German interpretation are guaranteed, and for non-legal working documents (like temporary reports), it often happens that the documents are left untranslated in one of these 3 languages (most often in English, but translations may be added later depending on the interest of the document).
In the EU legislation, there are tons of references to "languages", but much less about "script systems"; I have found no regulation about "encoding", beside the few obsolete references given in the MES character sets standard, which are also only recommendations and not mandatory... Eur-Lex and Pre-Lex (for example) contains *zero* reference to the "10646" or "Unicode" search terms...
