A group of advocates have sued New York City’s welfare agency on behalf of welfare clients. The advocacy group filed a lawsuit for six clients who individually speak Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese, Spanish, and Soninke which is a West African language. The lawsuit was filed for non-compliance with policies and laws that made it mandatory for city agencies to provide language translation and interpretation services for the convenience of its clients.
The case was based on a law passed in 2003. “The Equal Access to Human Services Act” was passed after facing resistance in the beginning from the Bloomberg administration. According to the law, city agencies were given a period of five years to incorporate comprehensive language translation services (in person or by phone) in a phased manner. Moreover, the law also stated that city forms should be available in the six popularly used languages which were Chinese, Spanish, Haitian, Creole, Korean, Russian and Arabic. The deadline for total implementation was set for February 2009 which the welfare agency in question failed to meet.
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