Procedural rights – Language of the procedure

Article(s) involved (national, EU, or other):

Problem

Sometimes the language of the procedural documents (e.g. investigation reports ; submissions by the controller; etc.) is different from the language of the complaint (including in Member States with multiple official languages, like in Belgium for example).

In the context of the OSS mechanism, when a complaint filed with an SA is sent to the LSA, the LSA investigates and may adopt draft reports and documents that are shared with the complainant for them to send their submissions. However, some SAs do not translate the correspondence from the LSA and therefore do not allow the complainant to answer in the language of the complaint/ procedure.

Ideal Solution

The language of the complaint should define the language of the procedure before the CSA, without prejudice to the translation of the document for the controllers, if necessary.

In the context of the OSS mechanism, the SAs should translate the documents into the original language of the procedure or the preferred language of the complainant before providing these documents.

Proposed Solution

Concept 2 and 7 shoud address these issues.

Reference to specific noyb cases:

See e.g. Belgian SA sending documents to noyb in English, despite English not being a national language. Equally, the Austrian SA sends autotranslated documents, that are sometimes of such poor quality that the arguments of the opposing side cannot be understood.