The episode of the supposed Catalan-to-Spanish interpreter who was unable to translate even a couple of simple sentences in the trial against the four police officers who put out the eye of activist Roger Español, causing the Catalan lawyers to have to self-translate or switch directly to Spanish, is by no means anecdotal. In the case of a political trial like this one (a trial is political when a victim of police violence for political reasons still has to go through the ordeal of being revictimized to claim the recognition that is owed to them), a fact like this must be understood as an added, or at the very least, subsequent aggression that should have been avoided by all means. Instead of this, the aggression occurred with all the harshness and all the absurdity that characterize the eternal contempt of the Spanish justice system for linguistic diversity, that is, for any language other than Spanish. Because this is the other circumstance that makes the scene at the trial against the police officers who mutilated Español impossible to consider an isolated or anecdotal event: the list not only of slights, but also of judicial actions in the form of resolutions and sentences, by the Spanish justice system against the Catalan language is already endless, uncountable, and unacceptable. And it reaches exactly to this very day.
It is to be hoped that a way has been found to continue the trial against the only four police officers who will have had to answer for the persecution of Catalan independence in the appropriate conditions regarding the translation service. But this does not remove the underlying problem, and the underlying problem is that the official languages of the State are exactly that, official. Not co-official, as some want and as is often repeated even by Catalan media, assuming, without realizing it, a position of subsidiarity that is not relevant. They are official languages of the State and, therefore, the servants of the State – judges and prosecutors and the entire judicial system are such – should know and respect them. And, therefore, it should be possible to hold trials without the need for translation services, repeating the Francoist stereotypes of jokes with Spaniards perplexed every time they heard a language other than Spanish spoken.Speaking of victims, in the trial we are talking about, the victimhood narrative emerged immediately from the accused police officers, claiming they acted in an “absolutely perfect” manner because they were faced with extremely violent hordes of dangerous pro-independence supporters. Everyone knows this is a lie, and having to hear this comedy again from (once more, the police are also) public servants only deepens the wounds left by the repression against the Procés. Physical wounds, as in the case of Roger Español, but also political, civic, and social wounds. The least that justice can do is avoid infecting them, and this can obviously also be said with the amnesty law in mind.
