Polygraph in police truth-seeking: examination of a technical tool and its judicial uses in Belgium

• In Event: POL Panel 9. Police investigative practices

Abstract

Belgium is the only country in Western Europe to use polygraphy in judicial investigations. Although the polygraph test has been used since 1998 and the Belgian federal police have been trained in it since 2001, its use in the judicial context has only been regulated by a specific law since 2020.

This paper is part of a research project conducted by the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC-INCC) on the technical aspects of the polygraph, its judicial uses and its effects on the police interrogation. Without claiming to answer the controversy surrounding the reliability and validity of the device, this paper will examine the legal tensions surrounding the use of polygraph in criminal affairs; shed light on the transformations of the investigative relationship when a technical (polygraph) and human (polygraphist) intermediary is integrated into the fact-finding process; and examine the traces left by the use of the polygraph (notably in perspective with the statistics of judicial activity).

This paper will be an opportunity to examine the continuing tension between the attempts to objectify ‘the’ truth and the functioning of the criminal justice system, which produces ‘a’ truth. In keeping with the theme of the EUROCRIM2023 conference – “The Renaissance of European Criminology” –, we will thus study the real effects of the importation of a culture and a technical tool into the production of justice in a European country that has not followed the choice of its neighbours, i.e. the refusal to use polygraphy in judicial procedures.

Authors

• David Henri Scheer, National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC-INCC)

• Bertrand Renard, National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC-INCC)