Grands colloques - Les technologies de l'information et de la communication au service de la justice du XXIe siècle -1 - 270

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VIDEOCONFERENCING IN THE FRENCH COURTS

that marks our age,22 it seems difficult not to do everything possible to
spare the victims more suffering.
Videoconferencing therefore appears quite promising: it allows victims
to be physically distant from the courtroom in order to spare them pain.
In doing so, it does more than that: it abstracts the victim in part from
the ritual aspect of the trial. This distanciation is only partial because the
spatial symbolism, the architecture, the decorum, and the legal robes are
not absent. They do not, however, have the same impact. Because the
body is not physically present, looks and words do not carry the same
weight, time is not experienced subjectively with the same intensity. Some
victims may find it beneficial not to have to undergo the particularly
stressful and painful experience of being confronted with the physical
presence not only of the alleged perpetrator but also of the magistrates,
the opposing counsel, the public and the press, which can impress and
destabilise them. This experience, however, is part and parcel of what
traditionally and anthropologically constitutes a trial: the re-staging of a
drama that the victim has experienced, adjudicated by a third party.
In other than legal contexts, it is known that videoconferencing, because
it is based on “fractured ecologies”,23 or site-specific environments of
action, that are therefore only partially shared, can produce effects of
distancing and disengagement, particularly for a site peripheral to the more
dominant core, where the main action is played out. This differentiation
and polarisation of sites can also be found in the legal environment and
may therefore ‘benefit’ some victims.
However, it must be pointed out that other victims insist on being
present at the hearing, in order to experience the trial, from which they
expect a great deal, in its entirety. Presumably, such victims would not
request videoconferencing and might even be reluctant to use it.
While we do not yet have consistent, systematic data on this point, we
can report some observations made in the courtroom, in the Examining
Chamber of the Court of Grenoble,24 that demonstrate the challenge facing
some victims, of seeing and being seen.25 A young woman, who had filed
a complaint against a family member for repeated rapes, had not seen the
man since she filed the complaint. The hearing before the Examining
22. D. FASSIN and R. RECHTMAN, L’empire du traumatisme. Enquete sur la condition
ˆ
de victime, Flammarion, 2011.
23. C. HEATH and P. LUFF, “Media Space and Communicative Asymmetries. Preliminary
Observations of Video Mediated Interactions”, Human Computer Interaction, 1992, Vol. 7,
no3, pp. 315-346.
24. At this site that we have assiduously attended, for over six months, we have observed
and filmed twenty hearings to date (one per week outside the court recess period). We have
a corpus of 115 cases in which videoconferencing was used (and about thirty cases of
appearance in court ‘in the flesh’, for purposes of comparison). We continue to collect
material at this site.
25. The question also arises for other members of the public, who express the desire for
their presence to be seen by the inmate: this is often the case with families, for example.

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