Friday the 13th: The Symbolic Power of Trials on Countering Terrorism with Democracy
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University of Warwick
United Kingdom
Abstract
Several years after the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, we are now used to new ways of delivering conferences, new codes of conduct and online etiquette. We are now familiar with the good practices of holding virtual meetings, have improved our knowledge of blended learning and have perhaps challenged the future directions of group debates. However, are virtual interactions within these new technological tools effective substitutions for real interactions? How about rituals and levels of presence? Have these new constraints increased the separation and segregation of audiences? This article aims to explore the implications of the ethics of digital justice when confronted with a particularly traumatic event; that is, the trial of 14 defendants accused of planning and executing attacks on the Stade de France, the Bataclan theatre and bars and terraces in the 11th arrondissement of Paris on Friday, 13 November 2015. The trial is referred to in France by the acronym V13, which stands for Vendredi (Friday) 13, a particularly nightmarish emblem indelibly marked by extreme violence.
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Author Biography
Valérie Hayaert is Research fellow at the Criminal Justice Centre of the University of Warwick. In 2015 she appeared in Genealogies of Legal Vision, Routledge, a volume co-edited with Pr. Peter Goodrich. In 2017 and 2018, she contributed to two exhibitions both held in Belgium: at the Groeningen Museum of Bruges The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War. and at the Museum Hof Van Buysleyden in Mechelen, Call for Justice 23 March-June 24, 2018).
Her new book Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory is forthcoming with Edimburgh University Press (October 2023). Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory leaves conventional readings of this pivotal figure in European legal history far behind. Hayaert's study brings together an analysis of thousands of images from the period 1400 – 1600, many of them previously overlooked, including artwork, frontispieces, legal texts, sculptures and statues in public spaces and in court buildings scattered across six countries. Lady Justice is taken apart and considered afresh - organ by organ, limb by limb, digit by digit, making a case for a treatment of allegory in all its complexity, ambiguity and affective force.
