Hi Tim and Marcelo,
For what it's worth, I have experienced similar errors from time-to-time when trying to delete either items or collections.
Note that I've experienced these errors since the completion of an April 2018 upgrade from DSpace 3.X JSPUI to DSpace 5.X XMLUI.
(We use Atmire's hosted Open Repository services, so when I run into these issues I submit a ticket to Atmire, if the error prevents me from doing something that I need to do, and then they resolve the issue.)
I'm not a technical developer, so I don't know if these issues are similar - but I wanted to chime in since I've seen a similar-looking error in our repository. Note that this error, at least for me, occurred with a single collection or single item that is not mapped into multiple collections.
Sincerely,
Kimberly at the University of Arizona Libraries