In October 1999, during the Council in Tampere, the European Union set the objective of maintaining and developing an area of freedom, security and justice. Since then borders had confided and rules had been imposed to citizens crossing from one state to the other but rights had been created also, or, at least, people have been gradually fighting for them.

The linguistic matters have already produced a big distance between the citizens and the institutions but the principle of mutual recognition should become the cornerstone of judicial co-operation in both civil and criminal matters within the Union. A bigger recognition of judicial decisions and judgments and the necessary approximation of legislation would facilitate co-operation between authorities and the judicial protection of individual rights.

However to apply the mutual recognition principle, implies a mutual confidence between authorities of other Member States as equivalent to their own, implying not only trust in the adequacy of one's partners' rules, but also trust that those rules are correctly applied. The right to a fair trial and the right to the defence elapse from the Fundamental Rights Charter, but nor always have functioned in the more correct way. The adhesion in itself didn’t always assured a reliable degree in the penal systems of another Member-State, and, about ten years later, in November of 2009, On 30 November 2009, the Council adopted the Roadmap for strengthening procedural rights of suspected and accused persons in criminal proceedings .

Taking a gradual approach, the Roadmap calls for the adoption of measures regarding: the right to translation and interpretation (measure A), the right to information on rights and information about the charges (measure B), the right to legal advice and legal aid (measure C), the right to communication with relatives, employers and consular authorities (measure D), and regarding special safeguards for suspected or accused persons who are vulnerable (measure E).

At this moment, we are about to adopt the directive related with measure A. It is still a small part of the Roadmap, but it is certainly a step forward for those who want and have all the right to understand and to answer to a sentence in its native language, or in any other language that he understands and that allows him to fully exercise the right to defend himself.

If the rights to interpretation and to translation in criminal proceedings directive would be adopted this week in the European Parliament, we’ll all start to have right to benefit from the  interpretation and translation services in criminal proceedings without having to pay any fee, and independently of the result of the process.  And if in some countries we’re still far away from a fair trial, at least we’ll already have judicial proceedings in our language when we live in another member state.