"RELATING TO CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE LAWS ON THE USE OF LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION IN BELGIUM" v. BELGIUM (MERITS) JUDGMENT 45 states that the withdrawal of subsidies "is entailed even in the maintenance of nursery classes which do not conform to the legislation in issue"; that it applies to schools which "from the technical and academic points of view" meet "in full the requirements of the law" since they benefited from subsidies before the entry into force of the 1963 Acts; that it in actual fact concerns only establishments situated in Flanders as there do not seem to be comparable establishments situated in Wallonia; that it "bears hard on French-speaking children, without giving any advantage to Dutch-speaking children" and that it "takes the form of a punitive sanction whose victims, incidentally, are not the educational establishments affected but the Frenchspeaking inhabitants" of the Dutch-speaking region and more precisely, in this case, "all the signatories of the six Applications" referred to the Court. The Commission further emphasises that the education in French in question "met a need": for it does not believe that private schools would arrange "costly classes without subsidies if the number of pupils were not adequate". As regards "evasions of the law", the Commission believes that the Schools Inspectorate could easily "unmask" them and on discovering them "impose the penalty of withdrawal of the grant". But this is not what is done. "The mere fact that a school provides unsubsidised partial or complete education in French, automatically, by a (...) guillotine effect, entails the withdrawal of all grants". Five members of the Commission however find no violation on the point in question; the Commission draws the attention of the Court to their dissenting opinions. 4. Decision of the Court 13. The situation with which the second question is concerned is bound up with that dealt with in the first. The legal provisions mentioned in the first render impossible, in the Dutch unilingual region, the establishment or subsidising by the State of schools which conduct education in French. The legal and administrative measures to which the second question relates, merely supplement them: they tend to prevent the operating of "mixed language" schools which, in a unilingual region - in this case, the Dutch unilingual region - provide, in the form of non-subsidised classes and in addition to instruction given in the language of the region, full or partial instruction in another language. What is in issue, therefore, is a whole series of provisions with a common aim, namely, the protection of the linguistic homogeneity of the region. The Court’s reply to the second question is the same as that already given to the first. Neither Article 2 of the Protocol (P1-2), nor Article 8 (art. 8) of the Convention are violated by the provisions in dispute. As the first sentence of Article 2 of the Protocol (P1-2) taken by itself leaves intact the freedom of States to subsidise private schools or to refrain