Seventy jurists in Gipuzkoa back the court interpreters' complaint: «insufficient» resources and suspended trials

A total of 70 jurists in Gipuzkoa have endorsed their "deep concern at the current state of the service" of court translation and interpretation in the territory's courts, backing the requests that a group of court interpreters has submitted this week to the Basque Government, El Diario Vasco reports. The professionals consider that the resources allocated to the service are insufficient given the workload accumulating in the courts, with a significant weight of cases involving people of foreign origin.

The complaint: more professionals, better qualified and better paid

The interpreters' letter, now endorsed by dozens of lawyers and other jurists, denounces that the shortage of resources translates into "an objective loss of technical quality" with direct effects on daily judicial work: delays and suspensions of trials and of statements in the investigating courts. The signatories demand, besides more staff, higher qualification standards for the service, having on occasion noticed translations that are not entirely accurate in a field —the judicial one— where technicalities and nuances require absolute precision.

Although the complaint does not state it expressly, the bulk of the pressure concentrates on Arabic. According to the spokesperson of the signing professionals, Hamed Elsayed, in the absence of official statistics "out of every ten interpreter services, roughly eight would be Arabic, one French and one the rest of the languages".

Why it is a right-of-defence problem

Interpretation in court is not a minor auxiliary service: it is the guarantee that allows a person who does not understand the language to exercise their right of defence on equal terms. The Spanish Constitution recognizes the right to be assisted by an interpreter free of charge, and European and Spanish case law has repeatedly declared proceedings void when interpretation was deficient, as we recalled when analysing the keys of the Organic Law on the Right of Defence. When the service fails for lack of resources, what is compromised is the process itself.

This is not the first warning sign about the human infrastructure of the administration of justice. The same logic of strained resources underlies debates we have covered in this section, such as the legal profession's proposals on the new courts of instance or the expansion of the judicial and prosecution workforce with 700 positions: technological modernization advances, but the human pieces of the system —judges, prosecutors, court clerks, interpreters— remain the bottleneck.

The practical effect for the territory's lawyers

For firms litigating in Gipuzkoa with foreign clients, the situation described by the signatories has operational consequences: hearings suspended for lack of an interpreter, statements delayed for weeks and an additional burden of procedural planning. The territory's lawyers know the problem well, which is why the interpreters' complaint has found cross-cutting support among judges and the bar.

What may happen now

The request is now on the Basque Government's table, which, within the framework of justice devolution, manages the personal resources of the service in the territory. The signatories ask for reinforced staffing, qualification criteria and a pay review that makes the service attractive to qualified professionals. The precedent of other autonomous communities suggests the response will depend on institutional pressure and on the legal operators' capacity to keep the issue on the agenda.

The quality of the interpretation service will remain, in any case, a point of procedural vigilance: the parties can and must challenge proceedings when interpretation does not guarantee comprehension, a remedy the courts have been applying rigorously when deficiency is proven.

The situation in Gipuzkoa is, moreover, a thermometer of what happens in other districts with high demand for interpretation: court translation services depend largely on self-employed professionals whose fees have not been reviewed for years, which makes it hard to retain the most qualified profiles in high-demand languages. If the market does not offer attractive conditions, the system ends up depending on the availability of a few overloaded professionals, with the risk that poses for trials held with full guarantees.