TRUE Project Team News and Events: May and June 2026
- Yvonne McDermott Rees
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The TRUE project team has been busy over the past few months! Here are some highlights from May and June:
May 2026: Bucharest, The Hague, Siracusa, Boulder
From 4-5 May 2026, the Bucharest Bar Association, The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and the Leaders for the Future Association hosted an international conference, ‘Strengthening the Rule of Law – Bilateral Legal Dialogue between the UK and Romania’. The event brought together lawyers, judges, law professors and experts from Romania and the United Kingdom in Bucharest, providing a framework for in-depth dialogue on essential topics for the functioning of justice and the strengthening of the rule of law. Yvonne presented on AI in the justice system and evaluating user-generated evidence.
On 19 May 2026, Yvonne and Anne provided a workshop on 'Digital Evidence in International Criminal Trials: Insights from the TRUE Project' to Judges and Legal Officers at the International Criminal Court. Yvonne and Anne shared insights and key research findings from the TRUE Project on the use and evaluation of digital evidence in domestic and international courts.
Gabi was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder from December 2025-June 2026. Supported by a Fulbright Schuman Research Scholar Award, she worked alongside long-term collaborator Leaf van Boven in developing new projects crossing social cognition and political trust. Gabi’s research explores questions including: How much people think trusting facts is important when disinformation is so prevalent? When do they trust images and when do they not? And how we can support them to be epistemically vigilant and ask better questions?
Yvonne presented TRUE project research at the 25th annual Specialization Course in International Criminal Law for Young Penalists organized by the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights from 25-30 May 2026.
June 2026: Lancaster, London, Newcastle, Oxford
Rebecca recently attended the CADS 2026 Conference at Lancaster University, a three‑day conference showcasing innovative work in corpus‑assisted discourse studies. The programme brought together researchers working across diverse social, political, and digital contexts, highlighting how corpus methods continue to evolve and expand.
Rebecca presented her research on how trust is distributed across the courtroom, focusing on juries’ evaluations of expert witnesses and user‑generated digital evidence. Her session contributed to the conference’s broader interest in legal discourse, credibility, and public trust.
Across the event, several themes stood out:
Digital communication and online ecosystems — analysing influencers, clickbait, TikTok narratives, AI‑generated news, and multimodal meaning‑making across social platforms.
Sociopolitical issues in the news — investigating how newspapers frame topics such as national debt, democracy, inequality, and climate change.
Methodological innovation — showcasing new approaches that combine CADS with experiments, multimodal analysis, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Legal and courtroom communication — including work on coercive control, Supreme Court dissent, and Rebecca’s own research on trust in jury deliberations.
A warm thanks to the organisers and presenters for fostering such an engaging and collaborative environment.
On 8 June 2026, Maryanne and Rebecca participated in a World Café event in Newcastle Upon Tyne, which brought together experts from law, computer science, linguistics, psychology, juror decision‑making, and AI.
The TRUE researchers offered their insights and experience in running mock jury simulations, and researching juror reasoning. The event encouraged creative, cross‑disciplinary dialogue, with participants exploring connections between case elements using evidence corkboards and visual sketches.
The discussions generated valuable insights that will inform the design and materials for an upcoming mock jury study, conducted by the Responsible AI UK ‘PROBaBLE Futures’ project at Northumbria University.
Yvonne and Anne participated at two Roundtable discussions on Digital Evidence and Deepfakes hosted by the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice on 5 June 2026. The Roundtable brought together academics, lawyers, and civil society to discuss how the potential of digital evidence in accountability for atrocities can be maximised, and how the risk of deepfake evidence in criminal proceedings can be reduced.
On Saturday 20 June, the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales and the UNESCO Network of Experts on AI & The Rule of Law hosted a full-day seminar on 'AI, Human Rights & The Rule of Law', at The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in London. Yvonne presented TRUE project research on Trust in Evidence in an age of AI.
Comments