Access to Justice for Minority Language Communities

Offers unique insights into the justice system, its power and the abuses that can happen to marginalised people when they intersect with the justice system. This book explores how minority language users experience access to justice and the right to a fair trial when they use their language in the criminal justice system. It investigates the lived experiences of Irish speakers and deaf Irish Sign Language users who have directly interacted with the criminal justice system. Treating identity as both internally constructed and externally imposed, it focuses on the issues raised when internally constructed identities are misunderstood, oversimplified and misused by the majority or the authority. The two case studies presented here investigate three layers of access to justice: procedural access, substantive access and symbolic access. This lens reveals the areas where, in spite of legal protections to safeguard fairness, minority language users still experience unequal treatment. The book provides a nuanced understanding of the experiences of minority language users and will be of interest to researchers in translation and interpreting, sociolinguistics and human rights law.