70 "RELATING TO CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE LAWS ON THE USE OF LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION IN BELGIUM" v. BELGIUM (MERITS) JUDGMENT Kingdom, repealed the Act of 15th July 1932. Under Section 19 of the 1963 Act: "Only school-leaving certificates that have been issued by the educational establishments referred to in Section 1 or by other independent educational establishments, in accordance with the provisions of this Act, may be subject to homologation. An exception shall be made in the case of certificates issued by a university by way of exception from Section 4 of this Act to recognise studies during a preparatory year for the degree of candidat ingénieur civil." Section 1, to which Section 19 refers, lays down that the Act of 30th July 1963 is applicable to "official nursery, primary and secondary schools and teachers’ training, technical and artistic colleges" and to "similar independent establishments subsidised or recognised by the State". As for Section 4, it stipulates that "the medium of instruction is Dutch in the Dutch-language region, French in the French-language region and German in the German-language region, except for the cases laid down in Sections 6-8". The scope of Section 19, cited above, has been the subject of controversy between the Applicants and the Belgian Government. The Applicants maintained that, according to Section 19, taken with Section 1, the homologation of secondary school leaving certificates no longer depends, as under the Act of 15th July 1932, exclusively upon the "linguistic regularity" of the studies in question, but also upon that of the earlier nursery and primary education. The Belgian Government contested the accuracy of this interpretation. After examining the problem, the Commission came to the conclusion, together with the Belgian Government, that Section 19 in actual fact applies only to secondary education. The views developed by the Commission on this point seem entirely convincing to the Court. 38. Under the 1963 legislation, as under that of 1932, refusal of homologation can be remedied by an examination before the Central Board. As the Belgian Government has emphasised, "the Central Board was not originally created as a means for escaping the provisions of the language laws, but with a social and democratic aim: it enables children from poor families, whose parents could not afford to pay for regular schooling, to acquire nevertheless a legally recognised diploma. It also serves to correct mistakes where a child has gone into the wrong stream". Hence there are among those who appear before the Board, in addition to pupils who have completed their studies without conforming to the language laws, "many persons, who are self-taught, have received an irregular education or have followed a correspondence course". Central Boards exist not only at the level of intermediate education (lower and higher), but also for commercial education, teachers’ training, university education and the most important branches of technical and artistic education.