The Shifting Role of Survivor Testimony in Court: the Case of the November-13 Attacks Trial (V13)

Testimony of Survivors in Judicial Proceedings: The Case of the Terror Trials in Paris

Talk by: Hélène Quiniou 

PhD Candidate, Anthropology

Fellow, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

Columbia University

https://anthropology.columbia.edu/content/helene-quiniou

The space given to the testimony of survivors in judicial proceedings has been a distinctive feature of “historical trials” since the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which is widely considered to have ushered in the “era of the witness” by calling 111 Holocaust survivors to testify in court. However, my ethnography of two landmark trials for terrorism in France—namely the trial of the January 2015 attacks and the ongoing “V13”—identifies a shift in the part played by victims as legal witnesses through the invocation of victims’ “Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD). Indeed, the new role of PTSD in the production of legal evidence raises a series of fundamental questions about the uneasy intersection of criminal justice and humanitarian law. How is criminal legislation being reshaped by personal injury law in the context of the largest criminal trials in modern French history?