Politics

  • Ministry of Justice and Capita breach Magna Carta

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    The administration of justice in England has a long history. Nearly 800 years ago, on 15th June 1215, King John and 25 barons of the realm signed the Magna Carta Libertatum or The Great Charter of the Liberties of England (otherwise simply known as Magna Carta) in a field on an island in the Thames at Runnymede with 12 bishops and 20 abbots as witnesses.

    If you’ve ever read it, you’ll know that Magna Carta is a curious hybrid of a document whose content ranges from the seemingly mundane, such as the removal of fish weirs on the rivers Thames and Medway, to such major legal concepts as trial by a jury of one’s peers and various rules for the administration of justice, which have been implemented by many other jurisdictions around the world, particularly those based on common law.

    Parts of Magna Carta are still in force today: you can see which (with relevant amendments) by reading the text in the UK Statute Database.

    image of 1 of 4 surviving original copies of Magna Carta, now in the British Library
    One of 4 surviving original copies of Magna Carta, now in the British Library

    What has Magna Carta to do with the Ministry of Justice and Capita? The answer is the disastrous contract for interpreting in courts and tribunals which the Ministry of Justice – in its limited wisdom – handed over to Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).

    An English translation (the original text was drafted in Latin. Ed.) of Clause 40 of the original 1215 text reads:

    To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.

    If court proceedings cannot take place due to unqualified interpreters being sent to court by Capita T&I, or interpreters not showing up for court assignments, that sounds very much like justice being delayed and could even be bordering on refusal. By their cavalier attitude to the administration of justice, the Ministry of Justice (perhaps it should be renamed the Ministry of Injustice. Ed.) and Capita T&I are showing their contempt for eight centuries of English law.

  • Capita sends unqualified interpreter to Old Bailey

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    This blog never ceases to be amazed at the mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting service by Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).

    Under the title ‘Judge corrects a Capita Interpreter’, Linguist Lounge recently published the post by ‘Stranger’ quoted below, which is reposted here with the kind permission of the site administrators.

    At court I fall into conversation with a Capita interpreter. She is North African and does Arabic. Prepared to do French too but only in simple cases. She tells Capita this but still gets sent to do a job at Bailey. The judge was French speaker and, she said, corrected her translation several times. She was greatly embarrassed and told Capita they shouldn’t have sent her. They told her that she should withdraw her name for French in that case. But they knew she wasn’t qualified for French, yet sent her to the court that deals with the most serious criminal matters.

    If you are sending someone to the Bailey you know it is not to interpret for a defendant who has been caught speeding. She says that the admin staff at Capita didn’t have a clue what they were doing. She seemed very unhappy with her “employers”.

    As pointed out by the original author, the Old Bailey doesn’t handle speeding offences. It is better known under its official title of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales and deals with major criminal cases from Greater London and, in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales. Were I the judge in that case, I would have had Capita Translating & Interpreting charged with contempt of court for not respecting the court’s authority.

  • UK Parliament: no open standards here

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    Did you know House of Commons Select Committees only accept submissions in Microsoft’s proprietary formats?

    Today in my Twitter feed I read a tweet announcing the deadline for submissions to the Transport Select Committee for a new inquiry on local authority parking enforcement.

    Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:

    2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.

    image of Parliament's crowned portcullis
    Parliament: we’re a Microsoft-only shop.
    Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.

    For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.

    Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.

    Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:

    Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.

    Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.

  • Budget shocker: “one pence”

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media, Tech

    Gidiot Osborne looking smarmyToday was a momentous day for George Gideon Oliver Osborne (aged 41 and three-quarters), a man who does Chancellor of the Exchequer impressions. Firstly, he joined Twitter. Needless to say, there was the usual warm Twitter welcome for politicians, as evidenced by the use of the hashtag #gidiot. Those using the hashtag were slightly more polite than other reactions to George’s embracing of Twitter.

    Secondly, it was also the day of the Budget. In summary there was very little to cheer about, except the abolition of the beer duty escalator.

    However, what made me cringe while listening to the Chancellor’s speech live on radio (apart from his whining, grating tone. Ed.) was his language: at one point near the end, I distinctly heard him refer to the amount of “one pence“.

    Now, George isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but one would at least expect the Chancellor of the Exchequer to know the difference between penny and pence.

    Since the end of the budget speech itself, BBC Radio 4 news readers have also reiterated Osborne’s ‘one pence’ blunder – repeatedly. 🙁

  • Capita now using criminals as court interpreters

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    image of scales of justiceThe rolling disaster that is the Ministry of Justice’s Framework Agreement for court interpreting is a story that just seems to keep on giving, especially in terms of bad news.

    On Friday the Northampton Chronicle carried a report from Northampton Crown Court where the judge branded Capita Translating and Interpreting as “hopelessly incompetent” (posts passim.

    Included in the piece is the following sentence:

    Mirela Watson, an Essex-based Romanian interpreter, said other issues nationally have included a trial collapsing because an under-qualified interpreter failed to interpret properly, and another where a crown court judge recognised an interpreter as a convicted prostitute.

    One is tempted to ask how did the judge know. 😉

  • UKIP if you want to

    Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

    The Europhobic United Kingdom Independence Party is always carping about how the European Union wastes money.

    They’ve now provided unequivocal evidence of the EU’s profligacy: here we see 2 UKIP MEPs snoozing their way through a debate in the European Parliament and thus not earning their allegedly gold-plated salaries.

    image of snoozing UKIP MEPs in Euro Parliament
    UKIP: snoring hard for Britain

    Some may accuse UKIP of hypocrisy; I couldn’t possibly comment. 😉

  • Man City’s TĂ©vez falls foul of court interpreting disaster

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    image of Carlos TĂ©vez
    Carlos TĂ©vez, another of Capita TI’s latest victims
    Could Carlos TĂ©vez, Manchester City FC’s Argentine forward, be the highest profile victim yet of the court interpreting disaster (posts passim) presided over by Capita Translating and Interpreting/ALS?

    According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, TĂ©vez “was bailed because there was no interpreter at Macclesfield Police Station. He is to return there on Tuesday.”

    Cheshire Police have a contract with Capita Translating and Interpreting for the provision of interpreters.

    TĂ©vez was banned from driving for 6 months on 16th January for failing to respond to police letters and was arrested on suspicion of driving while disqualified last Thursday near his home in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

    If I were the man in black blowing the whistle, I’d given Capita Translating and Interpreting a red card and send them off the pitch for an early bath. 😉

    Hat tip: Linguist Lounge

  • Criminal Bar Association Chair condemns court interpreting shambles

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    It’s not just interpreters that are dismayed at the shambles that has been the outsourcing of court interpreting services (posts passim). Barristers are now beginning to show their frustration too.

    Below is the transcript of an interview given by Michael Turner QC, Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, to BBC 3 Counties Radio on 27th February 2013.

    This Government and the last have been obsessed by outsourcing publicly funded work.

    The problem with the present interpreter service which was started off by Applied Language Solutions (ALS) and is now Capita is that interpreters don’t turn up or when they do turn up they don’t speak the right language or they don’t speak English. It’s a con on the tax payer and a con on the victims of crime.

    It costs at a very conservative estimate £110 a minute to run a court room with a jury and so you imagine if an interpreter doesn’t turn up for half a day or an hour, what the on cost of that really is for the tax payer and that is what is happening.

    They often don’t speak the language of the defendant, or if they do they can’t speak English, so we can’t understand them.

    What happens when you outsource to the private sector is that the private sector is desperate to make a profit and therefore it pays absolutely appalling wages. If you want proper interpreting services these are professional people and you have to pay them properly. It is as simple as that.

    Lawyers see this on a daily basis. It is just not providing proper savings for the tax payer. This is country wide.

    What the Government has not done is properly assess whether this is a true saving to the tax payer.

    If you have an interpretation service which doesn’t actually provide the proper interpreters and that causes a delay in the court system, the victim of crime is let down, because the victim’s case can’t get on and it can’t be tried.

    As soon as you have got a court which is not sitting and is delayed you are costing the tax payer £110 per minute for that service. That £15 million which the Government pretends it has saved is replicated 10 times over on another balance sheet which the tax payer never sees.

    We have been screaming at the Government about this and we are yet to see whether it pays any dividends but the tax payer should know they are not getting value for money.

    The Justice Minister is not at the coal face and I and my members are and you can’t rely on those assurances of £15 million savings.

    Mr Turner has given his permission for these comments to be published widely.

  • 81% of court interpreters boycott Capita register

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    PI4J logoA survey commissioned by umbrella group Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) has revealed that four in five interpreters (81%) are still refusing to join the private register operated by Capita for interpreting jobs in courts and other parts of the justice system, even though the contract has been in operation for over one year.

    The group will now share the new survey findings with Justice Minister Helen Grant MP (I bet she ignores them! Ed.) as she considers her response to the recent Justice Committee report (6th February), which described the Ministry’s handling of the court interpreting contract as ‘nothing short of shambolic’ and said it ‘failed to heed warnings from the professionals concerned’ (posts passim).

    Meanwhile Michael Turner QC, the Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, speaking in an interview with BBC 3 Counties Radio, said the contract with Capita is ‘a con on the taxpayer and a con on the victims of crime’.

    A succession of six-monthly online surveys since August 2011 have consistently shown 80%-90% of qualified and experienced freelance interpreters refusing to work under the new system because professional standards have been lowered by the private contractor and the interests of justice are not being served.

    Madeleine Lee of the Professional Interpreters Alliance, one of 10 organisations comprising Professional Interpreters for Justice, said: “We can’t call a strike because we are freelancers. Nonetheless the strength of feelings has been borne out and the majority are not willing to work for Capita. It’s very clear that after one year it’s not simply a matter of pay, it’s a matter of principles, standards and quality – we don’t want to be lumped in with others who are not as qualified as we are”.

    A total of 859 interpreters completed the online survey between 29 January and 10 February 2013 with the results showing that the calls to review the Framework Agreement and the Capita contract are still supported by the majority of those in the profession.

    Keith Moffitt, Chair of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, also part of PI4J, said: “The survey findings are strong evidence for the Ministry of Justice that interpreters cannot be persuaded to work under the Framework Agreement or the Capita contract. The dissatisfaction of interpreters who haven’t registered to work was echoed by those who have in fact signed up for jobs with Capita TI, who said they were not happy with the pay and conditions offered and felt mistreated.”

    58% of those refusing to register with Capita stated they have been telephoned directly by Court clerks in the last 3 months with urgent requests for them to attend court because Capita has let them down.

    Geoffrey Buckingham, Chair of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters (ACPI), said: “We will be discussing with the Justice Minister that there have not been the marked improvements to the service which she believes are happening. How can there be when over half of the respondents to our survey who refuse to sign up with Capita say they are being contacted by courts desperate to get them to work? There have been continual breaches and no published statistics by the Ministry of Justice since August 2012. Those which were published last year are unaudited. The surveys we have commissioned are the only insights into what is happening and how interpreters feel and any attempts to persuade them to work under the Framework Agreement are bound to fail”.

    The Ministry of Justice has been repeatedly criticised, most recently by the Justice Committee, for signing a four year Framework Agreement for language services with Applied Language Solutions (ALS) which was acquired by Capita in December 2011 and now operates as Capita Translation and Interpreting.

    Incidences of interpreter ‘no-shows’ and poor quality interpreting at courts and police stations across the UK are still being reported at an alarming rate. For example, on 7th February at Snaresbrook Crown Court a case collapsed due to disputed interpreting by a Sylheti (Bangladeshi) linguist, resulting in Judge Joana Korner CMG QC specifically instructing the Crown Prosecution Service not to “hire any interpreters in future who are not on the National Register”.

    Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) have rejected Justice Minister Helen Grant MP’s publicly stated figures on the performance of Capita TI. On 16 January, in a written answer to Shadow Justice Minister Sadiq Khan, she said there was an “increasing improvement in service to 93.5% performance by August 2012” (I think I smell burning knickers. Ed.).

  • Open letter against Iceland’s proposed internet porn ban

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

    Yesterday a group of forty security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from 19 countries, including Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Palestine, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and the United States, released an open letter to Ögmundur JĂłnasson, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, regarding the ongoing discussions on the possibility of establishing internet pornography censorship in Iceland.

    The text of the open letter is reproduced in full below.

    Ögmundur Jónasson
    InnanrĂ­kisrĂĄĂ°uneytiĂ°
    Sölvhólsgötu
    ReykjavĂ­k

    Re: Open Letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Icelandic Minister of Interior, regarding Internet censorship

    Dear Mr. JĂłnasson,

    As security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from around the world, we are writing to express our deep concern with your current proposals to attempt to restrict Internet access in Iceland to pornographic content.

    Iceland is a liberal democratic state which should not serve as a role model for Internet censorship. Regimes, totalitarian and democratic alike, can use these proposals as an example in order to justify censorship of the Internet, practiced or proposed. It has already jeopardized longstanding efforts to prevent or abolish censorship in totalitarian regimes and protect civil liberties and human rights worldwide.

    The current discussion of blocking pornographic content has offered no definition, no evidence, and suggested no technology. This is an affront to basic principles of the society, and while we acknowledge that this discussion is at a starting point, we feel that the way it is being conducted is harmful.

    Traditionally, censorship has involved preventing publication and persecution of people with unpopular opinions. On the Internet, censorship has taken a new guise. It doesn’t merely prevent publication, but also restricts people’s access to the information they seek. Rather than silencing a voice, the result is depriving the population of material they can see and read. This is censorship, as it skews the way people see the world. It is tempting to regard filtering the internet as a quick and easy way to restrict unwanted speech, opinions, or media, which the government regards as harmful for either them or the people. The right to see the world as it is, is critical to the very tenets and functions of a democracy and must be protected at all costs.

    It is technically impossible to censor content delivered over the Internet without monitoring all telecommunications. Not just unwanted communications or inappropriate material, everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society.

    Internet censorship is used by totalitarian regimes in order to restrict people’s access to various information and material on the internet. The methods used to conduct this censorship are technically identical to the methods that would be employed by Iceland if these plans were to be implemented. The act of censoring pornography in Iceland differs in no way from repression of speech in Iran, China or North Korea. By stating that Iceland is considering censoring pornographic material on the Internet for moral reasons, they are justifying rather than condemning the actions of totalitarian regimes.

    The internet is not the source of violence, it is merely a medium by which violence is made apparent. If the government of Iceland is genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of victims of violence, there are many more effective ways. The prohibition of pornographic content may create demand for an underground porn industry, unregulated and most certainly affiliated with other illegal activities, as we have seen in the case of drugs or alcohol prohibition. Hiding the problem is not a solution and may in fact make things worse.

    If the Icelandic Government worries about children getting their sexual education from pornography on the Internet, the solution should be better sex education in the home or through schools. Sex education that deals not only with conception, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but also relationships, communication and respect.

    There exist decentralized technical measures that respect the rights and dignity of all citizens in a society which involves aiding families with providing an accessible way to make their own computer and internet access secure for their children, but technically speaking, it would still be possible to go around the blockage.

    Over the last years, Iceland has been regarded by the international community as a shining example of a free, democratic society. Iceland has positioned itself as a model democratic state in global context when dealing with freedom of the press, the open process of drafting a new constitution, and open review of information regulation. Therefore, we implore you to reject censorship as a viable option and seek more effective means of improving society, both in Iceland and abroad.

    Kind regards,
    Renata Avila Pinto, Human Rights Lawyer (Guatemala)
    Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA)
    Kim Pham, Principal, Expression Tech (USA)
    SjĂłn, Author, President of Icelandic PEN (Iceland)
    Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (USA)
    Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation (USA)
    Mina Naguib, Human rights activist (Egypt)
    Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon Foundation (Poland)
    Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation (USA)
    MichaƂ “rysiek” WoĆșniak, President, Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania (Poland)
    Ásta GuĂ°rĂșn HelgadĂłttir, Free speech activist (Iceland)
    Stefan Marsiske, Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (Hungary)
    Beatriz Busaniche, VĂ­a Libre Foundation (Argentina)
    Walter van Holst, Vrijschrift (Netherlands)
    Atanas Tchobanov, Balkanleaks (Bulgaria)
    Mazen Maarouf, Writer (Palestine)
    Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, Lawyer (Iceland)
    Douwe Korff, Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom)
    Arjen Kamphuis, Chairman, Open Source Working Group, Internet Society (Netherlands)
    James Vasile, Director, New America Foundation Open Internet Tools Project (USA)
    Timo Karjalainen, President, Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland)
    Ot van Daalen, Director, Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)
    Aleksander Waszkielewicz, President of the Board, Fundacja Instytut Rozwoju Regionalnego (Poland)
    GuĂ°jĂłn MĂĄr GuĂ°jĂłnsson, Internet Policy Institute (Iceland)
    Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (USA)
    SmĂĄri McCarthy, Executive Director, International Modern Media Institute (Iceland)
    Laurie Penny, author and journalist (United Kingdom)
    Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Center for Internet and Society (India)
    Thomas Hughes, Managing Director, Media Frontiers (Denmark)
    Miguel Morachimo, Hiperderecho (Peru)
    Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer and civil liberties campaigner (United Kingdom)
    Daniela Bozhinova, Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Citizens Initiative (Bulgaria)
    Dariusz Grzesista, Chairman, Polish Linux Users’ Group (Poland)
    Mohammed Tarakiyee, Jordan Open Source (Jordan)
    JĂłzef Halbersztadt, Internet Society Poland (Poland)
    Zineb Belmkaddem, Free speech activist (Morocco)
    Rafik Dammak, Free speech activist (Tunisia)
    OktavĂ­a JĂłnsdĂłttir, Executive Director, Human Link Network (Denmark)
    Josef Irnberger, Initiative fĂŒr Netzfreiheit (Austria)
    Markus Beckedahl, Digitale Geschel schaft (Germany)
    Alek Tarkowski, Director, Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska (Poland)
    Hugleikur Dagsson, Artist (Iceland)

Posts navigation