The recording of the conversation can act as evidence in civil, arbitration or criminal proceedings, but the said recording must meet certain requirements. In some cases, additional data is required to use such a record in court.
The recording of the conversation is often used as evidence in various courts. Thus, in criminal proceedings, such records are often used to confirm that a specific person has committed such crimes as receiving or extorting a bribe. In administrative proceedings, a recording of a conversation is often presented by road users who challenge decisions or actions of traffic police inspectors. Finally, in a civil procedure, a recording of a conversation can be used to prove the existence of certain agreements between the parties, although other evidence is usually required to obtain the desired result in the latter case.
How is a recording of a conversation in court presented?
The recording of the conversation is usually presented to the court with a transcript, that is, with the attached paper carrier, on which the entire recorded conversation is present in text form. This is what allows you to quickly get the information you need without listening to the audio recording itself. If a professionally executed transcript may be sufficient for presentation along with the audio recording of a conversation in a civil process, then in criminal proceedings it is mandatory to listen to the original source. This is one of the inalienable guarantees for the implementation of the adversarial principle of the process, since the same phrases uttered in the recording can be evaluated differently by the participants in the trial.
What can prevent the use of a recording of a conversation as evidence?
When using a recording of a conversation as evidence in a civil process, the parties may face certain problems, most of which directly depend on the quality of the audio recording. So, the interested party will need not only to make a professional transcript of the recorded conversation, but also to prove the belonging of the voices to specific persons. For such evidence, an examination is often used, however, with poor recording quality, experts often make a decision that it is impossible to fully confirm these circumstances. Moreover, the poor quality of the audio recording can prevent it from being correctly transcribed, which will also reduce its credibility for the court or other authorized body. The identified problems can often be eliminated by using the recording of the conversation in conjunction with other evidence to support certain facts.
