Capus, Nadja

2023, Brodersen, Kei Hannah, Capus, Nadja, Rosset, Damian

The tension between formality and informality is intrinsic to the implementation of criminal law. Criminal procedures in fact always happen on a continuum between formality and informality, where the different actors involved (police ofcers and other street-level bureaucrats, prosecutors, judges, experts, defense lawyers, etc.) continuously perform and negotiate (in)formality. This special issue explores these ’politics of (in)formality“ in different criminal law settings and from different disciplinary perspectives. The different empirical contributions explore the continuum between formality and informality as well as practices of informalization in two different levels of the criminal justice system: police investigations and court proceedings.

2021, Capus, Nadja, Brodersen, Kei Hannah

Purpose Corporate foreign bribery can have devastating consequences on communities and states. Over the past decade, there have been several promising developments, both national and international, that might increase the chances of victim states to receive remediation for the harm they suffered from foreign bribery. In particular, awareness has risen that victim states must be considered and new innovative items have been added to the toolbox of prosecutors in the fight against corruption that is assumed to also improve victim states’ standing in these procedures. This study aims to assess whether indeed victim states receive compensation through these novel procedures. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the three case studies of Switzerland, France and England and Wales for a comprehensive empirical and normative analysis of settlement agreements between defendants and prosecution authorities and of court jurisprudence. Findings This study shows that although de jure, it seems warranted to order the payment of remedies to victim states within domestic criminal proceedings, in practice, this rarely happens. A number of legal and practical obstacles account for this situation. This study, therefore, calls for the formulation of international guidelines containing the obligation to inform victim states of ongoing criminal proceedings on corporate foreign bribery, and guidance on how to identify the victim of this crime, as well as the damage caused. Originality/value This is the first contribution to verify whether claims that settlement agreements, recently introduced in England and Wales and France (and similar procedures are available in Switzerland), are beneficial for victim states in their quest to receive compensation. As this study shows that this is – not yet – the case in practice, this study proposes solutions that could lead the way for remediation of the harm caused by corporate corruption – and thereby, ultimately, to a more just outcome.

2017-9-26, Capus, Nadja, Lelieur, Juliette, Leslie, La Sala

2021-9, Capus, Nadja, Griebel, Cornelia

Interpreters in lawful interception of communications are an almost invisible group of lan-guage professionals. They participate in secret surveillance measures and enable law enforce-ment authorities to intercept conversations held in a foreign language. This group of transla-tional agents who perform a hybrid activity between interpreting and translation within an institutional legal context has received scant attention from either translation and interpret-ing or legal studies. If the topic is addressed at all, it is most often examined within the context of police interpreting, even though intercept interpreters do not participate in the kind of tri-adic communication situation typical of face-to-face interpreting. Moreover, the sensitive context makes it difficult to collect data on the topic. In this article, we analyse nine judgments rendered by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (FSC) from 2002 to 2019 concerning lawful in-terception with interpreters. Higher courts not only dispense justice but also contribute to the continued development of the law. Their judgments are also a rich source of knowledge, providing rare information about an understudied research area. These judgments are crucial because, as we will argue, it is the legal order and its implementation through jurisprudence that shape the degree of (in-)visibility of intercept interpreters. In addition, these judgments provide valuable information about the working processes and professional context of inter-cept interpreters. Our qualitative content analysis reveals that the FSC explicitly demands the visibility of intercept interpreters and their activity in some cases while implicitly accepting or deliberately generating their invisibility in others.

2021, Capus, Nadja, Havelka, Ivana

2008, Kuhn, André, Enescu, Raluca, Capus, Nadja, Mack, K.

2021, Capus, Nadja, Havelka, Ivana

Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.

2018, Capus, Nadja, Kuhn, André