Politics

  • Absent interpreters delay 642 court cases in 2012

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    image of gilded statue of Justice on top of Old BaileyThe Independent reports today that more than 500 court cases are being thrown out or delayed each week due to failings by prosecutors or in the court system.

    Government figures reveal that a total 106,859 cases before crown and magistrates’ courts were dropped or delayed in 2012, costing the public purse an estimated £17.4 mn.

    Of this total the absence of an interpreter was responsible for delays to 642 cases in the year in question.

    No doubt Helen Grant MP and her colleagues at the Ministry of Justice will attribute these interpreter absences as “teething troubles” with its contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, rather than a sign of the latter’s total incompetence and yet more evidence that it was wrong to fiddle with the previous arrangements with interpreting services for courts and tribunals in the first place.

  • Save Felix Road Adventure Playground – the final push

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    This blog has featured the campaign to save Felix Road Adventure Playground from closure before (posts passim).

    image of Felix Rd Adventure Playground
    Felix Rd Adventure Playground

    The email below has now been received from local councillor Margaret Hickman and requires no further explanation.

    Dear All,

    The community around Felix Road Adventure Playground would be so grateful if you could complete the on-line petition which is below. What we are trying to do is collect 3.5k signatures to trigger a debate in the council chamber. We want to ensure that a long term sustainable solution is found for all the adventure playgrounds in the city.

    Can you please sign the petition now on-line and forward this email to all your Bristol contacts.

    Thank you so much.

    Best wishes. Marg

    Here is the link to the e-petition to save Felix Road: http://epetitions.bristol.gov.uk/epetition_core/community/petition/2326

    As the adventure playground has been a valuable local facility for decades, I’ve signed the petition already; have you?

  • YLAL: interpreting outsourcing a lesson for legal aid changes

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    YLAL logoThere’s a debate on criminal legal aid reforms and price competitive tendering taking place in Westminster Hall on 4 September 2013. The debate has been secured by Labour’s Karl Turner MP and will centre on the Ministry of Justice’s proposed changes to criminal legal aid contained in the consultation paper “Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a More Credible and Efficient System”.

    Ahead of the debate, Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL), a 2,000-strong group of lawyers committed to practising in areas of law traditionally funded by legal aid, has very helpfully prepared a briefing note (PDF) ahead of this debate.

    The briefing note is not very complementary about the MoJ’s experience with the outsourcing of interpreting services for courts and tribunals to ALS/Capita T&I (posts passim) and makes the following point about this ongoing fiasco.

    Short term “savings” cannot justify the long term cost to the justice system, one which Mr Grayling is correct to describe as “a justice system of which we can be proud and which justly deserves its world-wide recognition for impartiality and fairness”. We should learn the lessons of outsourcing to the lowest bidder and how this leads to the state picking up the tab when providers fail to deliver, for example, the contracting of interpreting services for the court and tribunal system.

    What’s the betting Justice Minister ‘Failing’ Grayling – the first non-lawyer to be appointed Lord Chancellor since 1673 – completely ignores all advice and pushes ahead regardless with his disastrous plans?

  • Capita: feast or famine

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    So far this blog has recorded a dearth of Capita T&I interpreters for the jobs they’re supposed to be doing in the country’s courts (posts passim).

    Now just for a change we’re pleased to report a surfeit, as shown in this tweet (screenshot below).

    Tweet screenshot

    Are Capita T&I interpreters like buses – one waits for ages and then 3 turn up at once? Or do Capita’s finest believe in safety in numbers? Is any comment on this amazing development forthcoming from Helen Grant MP, the Minister for Victims and the Courts?

    I think we should be told.

  • Replacement interpreter has to leave after 30 minutes

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Reposted from RPSI Linguist Lounge.

    Barbara Hecht writes:

    I represented a 52 year-old woman of good character needing an interpreter, first appearance 10 am start – she was in virtual court so she was in the police station. The interpreter was there early and promptly (and spoke the language required well) but…there was a part heard trial in another court where no interpreter had been arranged. So they took my interpreter, and my woman in the police station who had already been there from 6 pm the night before had to wait.

    When I raised this with the trial DJ and said she was diabetic, she took the view that she could wait a bit because the police would look after her and carried on hearing submissions a bit longer in the part heard trial. A replacement interpreter was booked to come at 1.45 pm. When I found the replacement interpreter at 2.15 pm because the matter was put back to 2.30, he said he had to go!

  • A letter to the Prime Minister

    Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Tech

    The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN/IFRA) has written the letter below to the British Prime Minister following the recent spurious detention of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, at Heathrow airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

    WAN-IFRA is the global organisation for the world’s newspapers and news publishers, with formal representative status at the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe. The organisation groups 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries.

    No doubt WAN/IFRA’s intervention will have absolutely no effect the surveillance of citizens by the British state revealed by Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian articles or the UK’s abuse of terrorism legislation.

    The Right Honourable David Cameron MP
    Prime Minister of Great Britain
    10 Downing Street
    London
    United Kingdom

    23 August 2013

    Dear Prime Minister,

    We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries, to express our deep concern at the actions of government officials that led to the destruction of computer hard drives at the offices of the Guardian newspaper on 20 July.

    According to reports, the decision to destroy the equipment was made by Guardian staff in response to the threat of legal action by the UK government. In attempting to exercise prior-restraint, the government’s aim was to prevent the publication of reports based on the leaked files supplied by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistle-blower, Edward Snowden.

    That your government felt the need to threaten legal action in order to block reporting into issues of public interest is deeply regrettable. Furthermore, WAN-IFRA is extremely concerned that the government’s actions were an act of intimidation that could have a chilling effect on press freedom in the UK and beyond.

    WAN-IFRA fully supports the actions of Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, who explained on numerous occasions that copies of the information stored on the hard drives were held elsewhere under foreign jurisdictions, and that physically handing them over to UK government authorities or destroying them would be a symbolic gesture only.

    In a separate but not unrelated incident, WAN-IFRA is equally concerned over the manner of the detention at Heathrow airport under Schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000 of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who has been instrumental in breaking the story on the NSA files. Mr Miranda had his personal electronic items confiscated and was held for an unprecedented nine-hours without charges being brought against him.

    The apparent misuse of this particular element of anti-terror legislation places journalists, and those aiding journalistic work, under suspicion of being terrorists or having involvement in terrorist activities. This is an outrageous and deeply disturbing connection to make, and we seek assurances from you and your government that the necessary inquiries will be made to ensure any inference of association between journalism and terrorism is not part of official policy and is publicly condemned as categorically misleading.

    Added to these latest incidents, WAN-IFRA is disturbed by the perceived slide in press freedom witnessed in the UK over recent months. Serious questions remain regarding the future direction of independent press regulation. Reports also suggest that since Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press behaviour as many as 59 journalists have been arrested under three separate police investigations. None have been convicted and many have spent months on police bail.

    As a result, the United Kingdom’s commitment to international standards of freedom of expression, as outlined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), of which Great Britain is a signatory, is under intense scrutiny both domestically and around the world.

    We respectfully call on you to reaffirm the United Kingdom’s commitment to a free and independent press and to realign the various government and police authorities behind this unequivocal message. We urge the UK government to respect the rights of journalists to protect their sources and to create the conditions necessary to ensure the press can continue its crucial role in maintaining free and fair societies, without government interference or intimidation.

    We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

    Yours sincerely,

    Tomas Brunegård
    President
    World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers

    Erik Bjerager
    President
    World Editors Forum

  • Valencia completes move to LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoJoinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that government of Spain’s autonomous region of Valencia has completed its migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite.

    Under this initiative, LibreOffice has been installed on a total of 120,000 public sector workstations.

    The initiative forms part of the costs savings and reduction programme undertaken by the autonomous government to reduce current ICT costs, and those of procuring proprietary software in particular. According to the government’s head of ICT, Sofia Bellés, “This action has already enabled us to save €1.3 mn. since the start of the project and will generate annual savings of €1.5 mn. in proprietary software licences starting from next year”.

    Besides the financial benefits, the investment in LibreOffice entails other benefits, such as the availability of applications in Valencian and Spanish, vendor independence and the freedom to modify and adapt the software to the users’ needs.

  • Would you buy a used Capita T&I?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    According to company financial information website DueDil, Capita Translation & Interpreting, the company that has been entrusted (rather foolishly. Ed.) by the Ministry of Justice with providing interpreting services for courts and tribunals in England and Wales (posts passim), is not doing particularly well financially, as the screenshot of the company’s latest basic financial information shows.

    screenshot of Capita T&I financial data
    Click on the image for the full-sized version

    Would you buy this company or offer it more work?

    Answers in the comments please!

  • Home Office’s racist van investigated by ASA

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    Yahoo News reports that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is investigating the recent Home Office poster van campaign targeting immigrants and dubbed the ‘racist van’ due to the crass insensitivity that is a hallmark of the Whitehall PR machine nowadays (posts passim).

    image of billboard van showing Home Office's anti-immigration message

    The ASA has so far received 60 complaints expressing concerns that the advertisements were “reminiscent of slogans used by racist groups to attack immigrants in the past”.

    The racist van was driven around the London boroughs of Barnet, Hounslow, Barking & Dagenham, Ealing, Brent and Redbridge – all areas with a high percentage of ethnic minority residents – as part of a £10,000 Home Office pilot scheme, which ended at the end of July.

    As a counterpart to the Home Office’s mobile billboard, human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty drove its own ‘anti-racist van’ around the streets of the metropolis.

    Liberty's anti-racist van

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