Workshop for the Expert Research Group: “Best practices for remote participation in criminal proceedings”

Participating in criminal proceedings via video link has become routine in courts across the globe, enabling judges, prosecutors, lawyers, defendants, and witnesses to appear in proceedings remote from the courtroom. Yet, video links often prove insufficient for replacing physical presence in a courtroom and risk jeopardising human rights, procedural fairness and the legitimacy of courts. It is therefore paramount that we understand the social utility, benefits and potential hazards, and critically engage with the digitalisation of the criminal courtroom as an essential civic institution. The significance of the problem is seen in the widespread implementation of video links during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance in Norway, Kenya, Ireland, England, Switzerland, the US, Canada and Australia. In the Basque Country, courtroom video links are a prioritised area of development.

The overall rationale is to workshop an interdisciplinary approach to establishing best practice guidelines for remote participation and remote advocacy while ensuring procedural fairness, legitimacy and accountability of legal systems. The workshop will gather leading researchers and recognised experts from a range of disciplines particularly, sociological and socio-legal, in order to identify current gaps in knowledge and to create a research agenda for virtual criminal procedures best practice. It will provide a forum for critical and innovative thinking, interdisciplinary knowledge pooling, and collaboration.

The Virtual Criminal Justice Workshop will be structured around the following themes:

1. Digital justice rituals
2. Virtual presence and participation
3. Virtual due process
4. Judicial evaluations of credibility, remorse and guilt
5. Virtual reality and beyond

The workshop will build on the successful initial hybrid Virtual Criminal Trials symposium, Maastricht University, 2023. During this event guest speakers appeared in-person and online from Australia, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States and audience members (20 on site and 25 online) represented over 10 different nationalities to contribute their research insights and identify gaps in knowledge. This preliminary symposium indicated the need for the continued examination of the challenges and opportunities that digitalization of courtrooms brings, and the profound benefits of international and interdisciplinary collaborative engagement in legal innovation. The convenors of this workshop have also founded the Virtual Criminal Justice Network (VCJN), a multidisciplinary and international network of scholars interested in video links in court. This workshop will enable the VCJN to continue its vital work in exploring video links and more firmly establish its intra- and external network collaborations.