Heidi Salaets, Shanti Heijkants & Katalin Balogh
The right to an interpreter is part and parcel of the roadmap for strengthening procedural rights of suspected or accused persons in criminal proceedings. Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings has sought to lay down common minimal rules on this right to a fair trial. Arguably, the directive could be seen as a push towards the institutionalisation of interpreting and the professionalisation of interpreters in criminal proceedings.
Assuming that vulnerability means a suspect’s or accused’s difficulty in understanding or following the content or the meaning of the proceedings, the interpreter could be seen as the gateway to facilitating such understanding.
In our presentation, we will focus on Flemish and Brussels prisons in Belgium and answer the question as to how far language rights reach, assuming that they are at least respected during the criminal procedures that eventually lead to incarceration. Thanks to empirical data we obtained from foreign-language-speaking (FL) prisoners explaining their service paths up until detention, we will show that even during pre-trial and court proceedings, the interpreter is seldom or wrongly deployed. Moreover, language rights seem to stop at the prison gates in Belgium: the Law on the prison system and the legal status of detainees, along with the Coordinated Laws with regard to language use in administrative affairs, show that language rights are downsized to an absolute minimum. Since language in administrative affairs in Belgium concern Dutch, French and possibly German (to a lesser extent), almost half of the prison population (49 % being foreigner) depends on Google Translate, the use of second and third languages, pictograms, inmates and staff that operate as self-proclaimed interpreters, and all sorts of gestures. This information was obtained through interviews with prison staff and management and will describe also how fundamental human rights are violated through denial of language rights.