Febby Mutiara Nelson, Intan Hendrawati, and Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun Sriwijaya Law Review ◼ Vol. 7 Issue 2, July (2023) [228] Editorial Office: Faculty of Law, Sriwijaya University Jalan Srijaya Negara, Palembang, South Sumatra 30139, Indonesia. Phone: +62711-580063Fax: +62711-581179 E-mail: sriwijayalawreview@unsri.ac.id| sriwijayalawreview@gmail.com Website: http://journal.fh.unsri.ac.id/index.php/sriwijayalawreview Finding the Truth in A Virtual Courtroom: Criminal Trials in Indonesia during the COVID-19 Febby Mutiara Nelson, a Intan Hendrawati, a and Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun b a Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia. Corresponding author Febby Mutiara Nelson, e-mail: febymutiara.n2@gmail.com b Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia. E-mail: rayun@unimelb.edu.au Article Abstract Keywords: Criminal Proceedings; Technology; The COVID- 19; Virtual Courtroom. Article History Received: Nov 30, 2022; Reviewed: Jan 13, 2023; Accepted: Jul 18, 2023; Published: Jul 31, 2023. DOI: 10.28946/slrev.Vol7.Iss2.2 465.pp228-243 Video conferencing through video call platforms, such as Zoom and Google Meet, has become a useful option for judges holding criminal trials during the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries. This trend also occurred in Indonesia. Some judges believe that video conferencing technology will help them accomplish justice in an emergency, referring to the legal maxim 'salus populi suprema lex esto’ or ‘let the welfare of the people be the supreme law’. Although virtual trials assist courts in preventing the spread of the deadly virus, they have also affected the work of judges to reach the substantive truth. This paper examines the challenges concerning the rights of the accused and technological matters that have emerged under the use of virtual courtrooms and, in some ways, led to unfair trial procedures. We argue that the absence of laws that regulate virtual courtrooms, along with an outdated the Code of Criminal Procedure in Indonesia (KUHAP), can lead to miscarriages of justice. The arguments presented in this article are based on survey data conducted from December 2020 to January 2021. The respondents are judges from Indonesia's western, middle, and eastern regions who used video conference facilities for criminal court hearings during the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020-2021. ©2019; This is an Open Access Research distributed under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://Creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original works are properly cited. INTRODUCTION The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has drastically changed how legal procedures are undertaken, including those in criminal trials. Around the world, this pandemic has challenged courts to tackle cases despite their limited abilities to operate face-to-face communication, resulting in the utilisation of virtual courtrooms through video conference applications such as Zoom and Google Meet. In some countries which experienced a severe spread of COVID-19, like Italy, civil and criminal proceedings were suspended for several ISSN Print: 2541-5298 ISSN Online: 2541-6464 228-243