The impact of digital technologies on victim interrogation: enhancing practices and protecting rights

Abstract

This paper examines the future of victim’s rights in the digital era, focusing on how new technologies can reshape victim interrogation practices. It explores the potential for enhanced transparency, tailored support, and improved evidence collection while addressing ethical and legal challenges. The research also highlights the privacy challenges of digitizing victim interrogation processes, emphasizing the need for updated protocols to safeguard the rights of those involved. The paper recommends ways for improving victim rights in criminal prosecutions. Ukraine is the first testing ground for “digital justice in wartime”. By early 2015 more than 160 000 suspected war-crime incidents had been registered – numbers that far exceed the capacity of traditional investigative and judicial procedures. In response, law enforcement bodies have used encrypted virtual-court interfaces that allow displaced victims to provide testimony from abroad. These innovative solutions meet the EU’s reasonable-time and cost-efficiency goals, reduce geographic and financial barriers, as well as health and security risks. Yet the legal framework is lagging behind the technology. At trial, Ukrainian courts only permit videoconferencing on a narrow, discretionary basis and solely through the licensed TrueConf platform; at the pre-trial stage remote questioning is effectively barred whenever the participant is outside the jurisdiction of the investigator’s law-enforcement body. The resulting “digital discretion” is technologically obsolete, constitutionally questionable and inconsistent with international best practice. Using Ukraine as a case study, this article analyses how emergency-driven digitalization can both mitigate and reproduce access-to-justice barriers. It argues that targeted amendments allowing certified e-identity, qualified e-signatures and secure home-based links are urgently required to render victims’ remote participation a practical reality while safeguarding due process and data protection.