Abstract
Due to an unprecedented growth in immigration to Ireland in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ireland’s foreign-born population began to rise very quickly, and it stood at the last census in 2011 at 12 % of the total population. One immediate consequence of this was a sudden and huge rise in the number of defendants with no or limited fluency in English appearing daily in Irish courts on criminal charges, a situation where courts were ill-equipped to deal with, as prior to this most language issues that arose related to the rights of Irish (Gaelic) language speakers to use this, the first national language, in court. This new demand presented a serious challenge for the criminal justice system, as well as significant new market opportunities for interpreting service providers; ultimately, the Courts Service contracted a sole service provider in an effort to rationalise and manage the situation. However, despite the willingness of the justice system to “fork out” what was seen by many as huge sums on interpreting services, despite the obvious willingness of courts to provide interpreters where required and despite the Courts Service’s claims of satisfaction with the service provided, numerous, serious and ongoing problems have been identified vis-à-vis interpreting in Irish courts, raising questions about the ability of non- or limited-English-proficient (LEP) immigrants on the margins of the justice system to access justice. This chapter is concerned with the relationship between LEP defendants, courts and language service providers, and it sets out to examine how the grey area between the rights of these defendants to understand and participate in their defence and the obligations of courts to ensure a fair trial combines with a focus of the criminal justice system on the efficiency and management of interpreting services rather than their quality, to facilitate increased profit margins for private service providers.
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Notes
- 1.
Ireland is a common-law country.
- 2.
Some judges wait until a direct request is made before providing an interpreter, while others attempt to ascertain whether or not one is needed—sometimes by asking the defendant or the lawyer and sometimes by other means; in one humorous anecdotal account from the research period mentioned above, a defendant from Pakistan told the judge, when asked, that he had no need for an interpreter, being perfectly competent in the English language; unconvinced, the judge asked what language was spoken in Pakistan and, when informed that this was Urdu, insisted on postponing the case until an Urdu interpreter was found. It was not even clear whether the bewildered defendant was an Urdu speaker himself!
- 3.
The European Court of Human Rights, for example, has found that challenges based on inadequate interpreting may reasonably be limited “to those where a motion was brought at the trial” Kamasinski v Austria, App. No. 9783/82, 168 Eur. Ct. H. R. (Ser. A) (Dec. 19, 1989).
- 4.
There is, in general, no right to an interpreter in one’s mother tongue; see, e.g. HRC (1994).
- 5.
The norm is to use the first person (“I”) as if the interpreter were not present; however, many judges use the second and third person, sometimes creating confusion (“tell him”, “ask her”…).
- 6.
She applies her concern equally to parts of England and Wales and Scotland.
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Waterhouse, K. (2013). Profits on the Margins: Private Language Service Providers and Limited-English-Proficient Immigrants in Irish Courts. In: Brotherton, D., Stageman, D., Leyro, S. (eds) Outside Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6648-2_10
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