Enregistrements, procès-verbaux, transcriptions devant la Commission d’enquête : le traitement de l’oral en questions

Many observations formulated before the Investigation Committee on the Outreau case and many recommendations have concerned the devices used to record the declarations of the persons heard during the criminal proceedings. The transformation of the oral into written declarations is considered from two dimensions: 1) the first dimension is institutional and raises the question of the impact of criminal procedure law on the events reported before the Investigation Committee. It has appeared that if registering the hearings of the children is compulsory, the legal devices for bypassing this obligation are numerous so that official reports remained the exclusive reference during the investigation phase; 2) the second dimension is linguistic and concerns the problems raised by the transcription of oral words in interaction. Discrepancies between video recordings done before the Investigation Committee and their transcriptions into the final report show that an official report, written the hearings is unable to render neither the content nor the sequence of what is being said. Video recording is therefore necessary in order to avoid interpretation problems. If the status of oral words in the criminal proceedings is not deeply reformed, we must conclude that similar cases such as the Outreau case are likely to occur in the future