Obiter’s piece about Philippe Sands QC and Siegfried Ramler says it all, really. What proof positive of the highly professional, onerous and often so harrowing role of the interpreter. The Ministry of Justice, with its reckless outsourcing of such services, really does run the risk of dragging us back to the bad old days of miscarriages of justice.
The seminal case was that of Iqbal Begum, where a wrongful conviction for murder, no less, resulted from a grotesque misinterpretation. That case was resolved in 1985, but what is to stop a recurrence following upon the ill-conceived framework agreement now inflicted on us? Nothing, is the answer.
Malcolm Fowler, Dennings, Tipton
