Attacks on Journalists

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, my particular concern is the protection, or lack of it, for interpreters and translators working alongside many journalists in conflict zones. I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

The role of interpreters in conflict situations is vital but poorly understood and rarely acknowledged. They are unsung heroes. I am quite sure that journalists would be happy to confirm how important interpreters can be for them, just as members of the Armed Forces have been fulsome in their praise for the interpreters working with them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, it is not sufficient to classify interpreters as “media workers” or “media professionals”, as they have been under various UN resolutions on the safety of journalists. On the contrary, subsuming professional civilian interpreters within the media generally has added to their invisibility and lack of status. Neither can they rely on the Geneva conventions for their protection, whether during or after a conflict, because they are simply not ordinary civilians any more than journalists are.

When foreign correspondents leave a conflict zone, the local interpreters are left to fend for themselves. Although we have some statistics on the appalling level of violence towards journalists, the vulnerability of interpreters, on whom many journalists would be the first to admit they depend, is undocumented. Interpreters are often the victims of distrust, discrimination and threats from all sides. Indeed, there is even a syndrome known as the translator-traitor mentality—in other words, the assumption that the local civilian translator or interpreter is not doing a neutral, professional job but must be working for the other side, whoever that happens to be.

I pay tribute to the work of Red T, an international NGO based in New York that monitors incidents involving the translator-traitor mentality. In 2012, it produced the first ever conflict zone field guide for linguists and users of their services. Some of the guidance is about very small details but ones that can make all the difference as to whether an interpreter is wrongly perceived. For example, users, including journalists, are asked to be aware of how they position themselves physically, making sure that eye contact is between the two parties and not with the interpreter, which might give rise to suspicions about impartiality.

Red T has also called for a UN resolution conferring special legal status on interpreters in conflict zones, similar to Resolutions 1738 and 2222 about journalists and the media and their safety. The Minister has been kind enough to discuss this issue with me before and to facilitate contact between Red T and our ambassador at the UN. I am very grateful for his interest and concern, but I ask him now whether he will undertake to raise the profile of this issue and give it greater momentum by adding the support of Her Majesty’s Government to that of other countries—so far, Sweden, Spain and Belarus—in calling for a Security Council resolution along the lines I have mentioned. I believe that the UK is currently the penholder at the UN for the protection of civilians, so, in my opinion, it would be an excellent example of leadership to take this issue forward.

I do not wish for one minute to deny or undermine in any way the vulnerability of journalists we have heard about, and I fully support the call for stronger measures to increase their safety and protection. However, I urge the Government—and, indeed, the media as it reports and comments on this whole issue—also to acknowledge the vulnerable position of local interpreters and to make common cause with them. As George Packer of the New Yorker magazine said about foreign correspondents and interpreters:

“Both are considered spies, but one is only an infidel, while the other is something worse—an apostate, a traitor”.


I would like to give three examples to illustrate that. In 2006, the journalist Jill Carroll was abducted in Baghdad, together with her Iraqi interpreter, Allan Enwiyah. Carroll was released physically unharmed after nearly three months, while the interpreter was found dead with two bullets in his head. In the same year, Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his interpreter were captured in Afghanistan. Mastrogiacomo was rescued in a deal that swapped him for imprisoned Taliban. The interpreter was beheaded. In 2015, Mohammed Ismael Rasool, an Iraqi interpreter, was kidnapped along with two British journalists who were working on a story about clashes between Kurdish youth and the Turkish security forces. The journalists were released after six days, but the interpreter spent over four months in prison and was freed on bail only because media and human rights organisations campaigned forcefully for his freedom and his life.

I hope that the Minister will reassure me that he is willing to inject a greater sense of urgency into the call for a Security Council resolution. I would also be grateful if he would agree to meet Red T the next time he is in New York on ministerial business at the UN. Finally, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, for tabling this debate and for giving me the opportunity to raise these important issues.