Oñati Workshop on Best Practices for Remote Participation in Criminal Proceedings

A roundtable format

The workshop was deliberately designed with a distinctive roundtable format, moving away from traditional paper presentations in favour of structured dialogue, collective reflection, and collaborative discussion. Beyond exchange, the workshop explicitly aimed at agenda setting: bringing participants together to identify common concerns, emerging questions, and shared research lines for future work on digital criminal justice. See the program. 

Multiple perspectives

The Oñati workshop in the Spanish Basque Country marked the third in-person VCJN gathering, following earlier conferences held in Maastricht (2023) and Lund (2024). The aim was not to deliver formal presentations, but to foster dialogue, reflection, and collaboration on the future of criminal proceedings in a digital world. With participants from disciplines including law, criminology, sociology, psychology, and architecture, discussions were strongly interdisciplinary and enriched by diverse methods, perspectives, and critical questions that challenged conventional thinking about criminal justice in digital contexts.

Various topics

Over the course of two days, participants explored the shifting dynamics of courtroom communication, virtual presence, fairness, and the experiences of trial participants in remote hearings. A major focus was on methodology: how do we study virtual justice in ways that capture its complexity, human impact, and future potential? Sessions also encouraged participants to imagine new directions—from speculative research designs to collaborative research outputs.

Follow-up

The workshop will result in a collaborative publication in the form of a Special Issue at the journal Oñati Socio-Legal Series (ISSN 2079-5971), planned for 2026/2027.