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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.
This book offers a timely and powerful socio-legal analysis of Gael and ISL users’ right to a fair trial, clarifying interpreter rights jurisprudence in courts and revealing how identity-based bias continues to undermine access to justice. It makes a significant contribution to language rights scholarship and the emerging field of Deaf Legal Studies.
McEvoy shows that access to justice for minority language users depends on system design: when institutions exclude minority language users and disregard their languages, language becomes a barrier. Rooted in interviews and doctrine, this book will engage legal academics and language-rights researchers alike.
Gearóidín McEvoy is a Lecturer in Law at Maynooth University, Ireland with an interest in Deaf studies, minority language rights, criminal law and policing.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Identity Construction and the Criminal Justice System
Chapter 3: Deaf and Irish Speaker Identity Construction
Chapter 4: Access to Justice
Chapter 5: The Right to an Interpreter and Procedural Access
Chapter 6: Minimum Standards of the Right to a Fair Trial and Procedural Access
Chapter 7: Substantive Access and Legislation, Training and Inclusion
Chapter 8: Symbolic Access and the External Identity: The Slíbhín and the Créatúr
Chapter 9: Symbolic Access and Recognising Internal Identity
Chapter 10: Concluding Remarks
Index