All articles by Malcolm Fowler – Page 3
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News
Tendering: grim precedent
So the Ministry of Justice is having to dip into its – that is to say ‘our’ – pocket to bail out a cack-handed scheme for interpreter provision wished upon the criminal justice system supposedly to save money. Who would have thought it? Well, anyone ...
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News
Figure it out
A dip in interpreter provision. And on whose figures? Even Capita is now hard-pressed to attempt to present a positive picture. I have striven again and again in letters to the Ministry of Justice, from the secretary of state downwards, to secure a straight answer to a simple though basic ...
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News
Ministry doublespeak
The embarrassing court interpreter outsourcing saga continues. Courts minister Helen Grant repeats the same old mantra of ‘a dramatic improvement in the interpreter contract’. Who says, exactly? The Ministry of Justice has in all conscience been asked this often enough. When its responses are shorn ...
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News
Interpreters contract: inept and dangerous
I write with regard to the court interpreter contract. Catherine Baksi is quite right still to be pursuing this particularly inept – and dangerous – example of outsourcing. Inept, since the terms of this monopolistic contract are holding the criminal justice system and we service providers to ransom.
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News
Court in a crisis
Many congratulations to the Gazette for focusing so crisply upon the real issues over the misconceived proposals for unsociable magistrates’ court hours. The Law Society’s president is also on the case. Her language may need to be relatively diplomatic. That said, these proposals are either half-baked ...
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News
Voicing concern
Journalists Catherine Baksi and John Hyde are to be congratulated for their perseverance in reporting on what is correctly described in your editorial as the ‘farce’ resulting from the engagement of Applied Language Solutions (aka Capita) for the justice system’s interpreting and translating services.
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News
Language barrier
Catherine Baksi is quite right to raise the issue of interpreters, of such concern for so long to those of us in the know. Pro bono (and with any number of colleagues from the defence, the prosecution, the police, the Probation Service, the courts service ...
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News
Did politics trump economics in the riot cases?
My letter has prompted many contributions from advocate colleagues. At Birmingham Magistrates’ Court, where special ‘civil unrest’ sessions were held on the Sunday, by midmorning on most week days you would expect to see tumbleweed drifting down the court corridors; so bereft of work is the judiciary.
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News
We must not swallow the argument that the police and courts initially responded well to the riots
I absolutely agree with Julian Young in respect of the under-acknowledged efforts of defence practitioners at the time of the riot arrests and courts.
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News
Upholding decency
I read with much emotion and ever-increasing indignation the brave and intimate feature by Jonathan Rayner concerning the serial failure of the ‘system’ to deal humanely or in any way appropriately with his son ‘Patrick’, particularly once the latter was introduced into the criminal process (see [2009] Gazette, 5 March, ...
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