Case law · Belgium · France · United Kingdom

What courts actually say about screenshots, chats and online evidence.

Judges rarely refuse digital evidence outright. They weigh it. A plain screenshot is easy to dispute: no date, no source, no proof it was not edited. The decisions below show where that weight is lost and what preserves it. Each entry links to the decision or an official summary, so you can read it yourself.

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UpdatedOctober 2026

Belgium

Belgian civil procedure follows a free system of proof (art. 8.8 Civil Code): a screenshot is admissible, but its weight is for the judge. The cases below turn on whether the other side could credibly dispute date, origin or integrity.

Decision	What happened and what the court held	Why it matters for your evidence
Hof van Cassatie 14 June 2021 C.20.0418.N · ECLI:BE:CASS:2021:ARR.20210614.3N.2 Read the decision →	A car dealer proved the agreed price with a secretly recorded phone call. The court of appeal had excluded it; the Court of Cassation quashed that decision. In civil cases, unlawfully obtained evidence may only be excluded if the way it was obtained affects its reliability or endangers the right to a fair trial. The Antigoon test now applies to purely civil disputes. « indien de bewijsverkrijging de betrouwbaarheid van het bewijs aantast »	Belgian civil courts ask whether the evidence is reliable, not whether it is formally perfect. A tamper-evident, timestamped capture answers the reliability question directly.
Cour de cassation 20 May 2019 S.2017.0089.F · LiberCas 10/2019 Read the decision →	An employer justified a dismissal for serious cause with purely professional e-mails the employee had exchanged on company equipment. The Court held that the ban on reading electronic communications without the consent of all parties (art. 124 of the Electronic Communications Act) makes no distinction between private and professional e-mails.	How you obtained digital evidence is scrutinised. Capturing your own screen and your own conversations keeps you on the right side of this rule.
Cour du travail de Liège 26 March 2021 arrêt du 26 mars 2021, division Liège Read the decision →	An employee sent violent, discriminatory Messenger messages to his superior, who forwarded a screenshot to the employer. The court admitted the evidence, finding the employer had learned of the message lawfully and without fraud, and upheld the dismissal for serious cause. A Namur division reached the same result two months later for a racist exchange shown voluntarily by its recipient. « a pris connaissance de manière régulière, légitime et sans intention frauduleuse du message »	Screenshots of private chats are accepted when they come from a legitimate participant. The debate then moves to content and integrity, which is what a certified capture secures.
Arbeidshof Brussel 3 September 2013 J.T.T., 2013, p. 497 Read the decision →	A manager of a listed company posted critical comments and links about his employer on a publicly accessible Facebook wall and was dismissed for serious cause. The court found no privacy breach because the profile was public, noted a technical breach of the electronic-communications rules, but applied the Antigoon test: the irregularity did not affect the credibility of the evidence, which was admitted.	Public social media content is usable evidence in Belgium. The test is the credibility of the capture, so document when and how you took it.
Hof van beroep Gent 10 March 2008 cited in Lexgo commentary on electronic contracting Read the decision →	The court attached no evidential value to an e-mail sent through a company's internal mail system, because such a message is easy to manipulate. « omdat dit makkelijk manipuleerbaar is »	A Belgian appellate example of digital evidence discounted for manipulability. A cryptographic seal and timestamp exist to close exactly that gap.
Hof van beroep Antwerpen 29 April 2013 cited in Lexgo commentary on electronic contracting Read the decision →	In a dispute over a text message offered as proof, the court observed that in theory anyone can send a text message from any phone, which limited the weight it was prepared to give it. « in theorie iedereen een sms kan versturen vanop eender welke gsm »	Authorship and date are the weak points of a message. The commentary on this decision recommends a timestamp as the remedy.
Hof van beroep Antwerpen 25 July 2023 2022/FA/618 Read the decision →	Former cohabitants disputed an agreement on dividing their property. The court accepted WhatsApp messages as a beginning of written proof which, together with the notary's e-mail, established the agreement. Belgian courts have since treated messaging content as written proof in several cases, including a 2025 Brussels enterprise court decision that a thumbs-up emoji could accept an offer.	Since the 2020 reform of the law of evidence, chat messages routinely count as written proof. Their integrity can still be challenged, so preserve them in a form that proves they were not altered.

France

French law also leaves most proof free (art. 1358 Civil Code) and, since the Plenary Assembly's decision of 22 December 2023, even unfairly obtained evidence can be admitted if proportionate. What courts punish is uncertainty about when and where a capture was made.

Decision	What happened and what the court held	Why it matters for your evidence
Cour de cassation, assemblée plénière 22 December 2023 n° 20-20.648 · ECLI:FR:CCASS:2023:AP00673 Read the decision →	An employer produced covert recordings of a meeting to justify a dismissal. Reversing its 2011 line, the Plenary Assembly held that evidence obtained unfairly is no longer automatically excluded in civil cases: the judge weighs the right to proof against the rights it infringes and admits it if indispensable and proportionate. « l'illicéité ou la déloyauté dans l'obtention … ne conduit pas nécessairement à l'écarter »	Admissibility is now a proportionality test. The fight shifts to whether the item is genuine and correctly dated, which is exactly what a sealed capture answers.
Cour de cassation, chambre sociale 30 September 2020 n° 19-12.058 · ECLI:FR:CCASS:2020:SO00779 Read the decision →	A Petit Bateau employee posted a photo of an unreleased collection on her private Facebook account; a colleague forwarded it to the employer. The Court accepted the evidence: obtaining it involved no stratagem, and producing it was indispensable and proportionate. The employer had a bailiff's report drawn up when the employee disputed that the account was hers. « le droit à la preuve peut justifier la production d'éléments portant atteinte à la vie privée »	When the other side disputes who posted what, the court expects a formal, dated capture. Having it ready is cheaper than ordering it under pressure.
Cour de cassation, chambre sociale 20 December 2017 n° 16-19.609 · ECLI:FR:CCASS:2017:SO02647 Read the decision →	An employer relied on Facebook content taken from another employee's work phone. The Court excluded it: the information was reserved to authorised people, and the employer could only reach it through a disproportionate and unfair intrusion. « l'employeur ne pouvait y accéder sans porter une atteinte disproportionnée et déloyale »	How you reached the content matters as much as the content. Capture from your own, lawful vantage point and record that you did.
Cour de cassation, chambre sociale 23 May 2007 n° 06-43.209 · Bull. 2007, V, n° 85 Read the decision →	A sexual-harassment claim rested on text messages the employee had received, transcribed by a bailiff. The Court admitted them: unlike a covertly recorded phone call, using a text message is not unfair, because the sender cannot ignore that the receiving device stores it. « dont l'auteur ne peut ignorer qu'ils sont enregistrés par l'appareil récepteur »	The founding authority for stored messages as evidence, by extension WhatsApp and e-mail. Note that a bailiff was used to fix content and date.
Cour d'appel de Paris, pôle 5, ch. 1 27 February 2013 constats internet · norme NF Z67-147 Read the decision →	The defendants sought to annul bailiff reports of web pages for not following the AFNOR standard on internet findings. The court held the standard is non-binding good practice and listed what suffices: describing the hardware, recording the machine's IP address, clearing caches, disabling any proxy, and deleting temporary files, cookies and history before the findings. « le vidage des caches de l'ordinateur préalablement à l'ensemble des constatations »	This is the French checklist for a credible web capture. A clean, isolated browser with its network traffic recorded meets every item automatically.
Cour d'appel de Paris, pôle 5, ch. 2 2 July 2010 RG 2009/12757 · Saval c/ Home Shopping Service Read the decision →	Screen printouts of web pages, including pages from the Internet Archive, were denied probative value. Nothing showed that caches, history and proxy settings had been neutralised, so the court could not be sure the content shown had really been online on the stated date. Screenshots were not rejected as such, only because of how they were made.	The classic case of a bare screenshot failing. Date and integrity must be demonstrable, not asserted.
Cour de cassation, 1re chambre civile 10 April 2013 n° 11-19.530 · ECLI:FR:CCASS:2013:C100344 Read the decision →	An employee insulted her managers on Facebook and MSN; the employer sued for public insult. The Court held that remarks visible only to a small, hand-picked circle are not public, so at most a non-public insult. « personnes agréées, en nombre très restreint … forment entre elles une communauté d'intérêts »	Who could see a post is legally decisive. Capture the audience settings and the share or follower counts, not just the words.
Cour de cassation, 3e chambre civile 5 March 2026 n° 24-21.034 · ECLI:FR:CCASS:2026:C300142 Read the decision →	A tenant denied having electronically signed a lease. The Court quashed the appeal judgment: before putting the burden of proof on the person who denies signing, judges must check whether the process used a qualified electronic signature under eIDAS, the only level that carries the legal presumption of reliability.	The most recent confirmation that "qualified" under eIDAS is what shifts the burden of proof in France. The same logic applies to qualified seals and timestamps.
Tribunal judiciaire de Marseille, 1re ch. civ. 20 March 2025 RG 23/00046 · AZ Factory c/ Valeria Moda Read the decision →	A fashion house proved the date of two designs with hashes anchored on the Bitcoin blockchain in 2021, backed by social-media publications and trademarks. The court accepted the blockchain timestamps as part of a body of evidence, found infringement and awarded damages.	The first reported French judgment accepting a cryptographic timestamp as proof of date, while insisting on corroboration. A capture that bundles timestamp, content and network log provides that corroboration in one package.

United Kingdom

English courts admit electronic evidence freely under the Civil Evidence Act 1995 and leave weight to the judge. The recurring themes are authenticity of messages and screenshots, the preference for contemporaneous documents over memory, and, since the Post Office litigation, scepticism about assuming computers are reliable.

Decision	What happened and what the court held	Why it matters for your evidence
Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) 20 November 2015 R v Khan [2015] EWCA Crim 1816 Read the decision →	The appellant wanted to rely on screenshots of BlackBerry Messenger and Instagram material said to come from a prosecution witness. The court refused: the screenshots carried no date or time and nothing confirmed who had sent them, so authorship could not be established and they could not be admitted. « no date or time, and no confirmation of who the message is from »	In criminal proceedings an undated, unattributed screenshot is worth nothing. Date, time and origin must be provable.
Employment Tribunal, London Central January 2023 Lehtonen & others v Hansbiomed Europe Ltd, 2200627/21 and joined cases Read the decision →	The claimants relied on screenshots of a WhatsApp thread with a manager. The employer pointed to an enlarged date banner, a visible colour change across the image, reversed message order, the time the screenshot was taken and shifting explanations about which phone was used. Without expert evidence, the tribunal found the thread was not authentic or contemporary and called fabricating evidence an abuse of process. « screenshots are timed but not dated »	A precise list of what a tribunal checks when a screenshot is challenged: date of capture, device, order and completeness. A sealed recording of the live chat removes every item from debate.
Employment Tribunal, East London June 2023 Carson v Lead Digital Ltd, 3202998/2019 Read the decision →	The employer called the claimant's WhatsApp screenshots selective and partly redacted, doubted they were genuine and asked for a forensic examination of her phone. The tribunal obtained the full thread, refused the forensic examination as disproportionate, and said authenticity could be tested by the claimant showing her phone in cross-examination. « the claimant can hold her phone up and show where these messages start and end »	Tribunals won't order forensic extraction for a routine dispute. A complete, independently timestamped capture ends the argument before it starts.
High Court (Queen's Bench Division) 10 March 2017 Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) Read the decision →	A Twitter libel case, the first to apply the serious-harm test to tweets. The offending tweet had been deleted, so its analytics were gone, and the claimant's own history had been wiped by an auto-delete app. The judge said that made much of the evidence about the abuse she received unsafe to rely on, although she still won. « the responsibility of a litigant to retain and preserve material that may become disclosable »	A judge spelling out that social media content must be preserved at the time. Deleted posts weakened a winning case.
Supreme Court 3 April 2019 Stocker v Stocker [2019] UKSC 17 Read the decision →	A Facebook post said a husband had "tried to strangle" his ex-wife. The Supreme Court held that the meaning of a post must be judged as an ordinary Facebook reader would take it in context, not by dictionary analysis, and allowed the appeal. « People scroll through it quickly. They do not pause and reflect. »	Courts construe the post exactly as it appeared on the platform. A faithful capture of the page, with its context, is the primary evidence.
High Court (Commercial Court) 15 November 2013 Gestmin SGPS SA v Credit Suisse (UK) Ltd [2013] EWHC 3560 (Comm) Read the decision →	In a commercial mis-selling claim, Leggatt J reviewed the psychology of memory and concluded that judges should place little if any reliance on witnesses' recollections of events and base findings on the contemporaneous documents. The approach has been followed across civil litigation since. « inferences drawn from the documentary evidence and known or probable facts »	English courts prefer the record made at the time over anyone's memory. A capture that fixes content and time on the day is exactly that record.
High Court (Chancery Division) 20 May 2024 Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch) Read the decision →	Craig Wright's claim to be the creator of Bitcoin failed. Joint forensic experts agreed that dozens of his documents had their metadata manipulated to show false dates, and that accounting data supposedly from 2009 had been created years later and backdated. « Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. »	The leading modern illustration that file dates and local clocks can be faked. A trustworthy date needs an independent third-party time source, which is what a qualified timestamp is.
Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) 23 April 2021 Hamilton & others v Post Office Ltd [2021] EWCA Crim 577 Read the decision →	The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 sub-postmasters prosecuted on the basis of the Horizon accounting system. There was no independent evidence of any shortfall; the prosecutions rested entirely on computer data the Post Office knew to be unreliable. « it was essential to the prosecution case that the Horizon data was reliable »	Since the Horizon scandal, UK courts no longer take computer output on trust. Evidence whose integrity anyone can verify independently, through hashes, seals and qualified timestamps, answers that doubt instead of relying on a presumption.

The legal anchors behind these decisions.

The rules the decisions rest on. Article numbers are given so your lawyer can check them.

eIDAS, art. 41: qualified timestamps

Regulation (EU) 910/2014. A qualified electronic timestamp enjoys the presumption of the accuracy of the date and time it indicates and of the integrity of the data bound to it. Applies in Belgium and France directly, and in the UK as retained law (UK eIDAS). Source →

eIDAS, art. 35: qualified seals

A qualified electronic seal enjoys the presumption of integrity of the data and of correctness of the origin of the data to which it is linked. instantproof certificates and evidence packages carry a qualified seal issued by an EU qualified trust service provider. Source →

UK: EU trust services still recognised

The ICO confirms that UK eIDAS allows the legal effect of EU qualified trust services to continue to be recognised and used in the UK after Brexit. Article 41(2) of UK eIDAS keeps the presumption for qualified timestamps. Source →

Belgium: Civil Code, Book 8, art. 8.1 and 8.8

Since 1 November 2020 a "writing" is any set of intelligible signs on any carrier that preserves their integrity, and a signature may be handwritten, electronic or by any other process (8.1). Unless the law provides otherwise, proof may be given by any means (8.8). Chat messages can count as a beginning of written proof (8.18). Source →

Belgium: Judicial Code, art. 519 §1, 2°: bailiff's findings

A bailiff may record purely material facts, without giving any opinion. Such findings are authentic as to the material facts the bailiff can perceive with the senses. This is the legal basis of the traditional online "vaststelling" or "constat", which instantproof complements at a fraction of the cost and which a bailiff can still verify afterwards. Source →

France: Code civil art. 1358, 1366, 1367

Proof is free unless the law says otherwise (1358). An electronic document has the same probative force as paper if its author can be identified and it is created and kept in conditions guaranteeing its integrity (1366). A qualified electronic signature is presumed reliable (1367 and decree 2017-1416). Source →

UK: Civil Evidence Act 1995, s. 1, 8, 9

In civil proceedings evidence is not excluded because it is hearsay (s. 1). A statement in a document may be proved by producing the document or an authenticated copy (s. 8). Business records in any form are received without further proof (s. 9). Source →

UK: Electronic Communications Act 2000, s. 7

An electronic signature, and any certification of it, is admissible as evidence on any question about the authenticity or integrity of a communication or data. Source →

What this means when you capture evidence.

Fix the date with a qualified timestamp

Under eIDAS art. 41 (kept in UK law as UK eIDAS) a qualified electronic timestamp is presumed accurate as to date, time and integrity. The burden shifts to whoever disputes it.

Prove the source, not just the screen

A screenshot shows pixels. A recorded session with a sealed network log shows which server sent the content, over TLS, at that moment. That answers the "it could be edited" objection before it is raised.

Keep the whole conversation

Several decisions criticise selective extracts. Record the full chat or page, including what precedes and follows the disputed passage.

Capture lawfully

Content you can see from your own account is normally fair game. Logging into someone else's account or a closed group you were never in is where courts draw the line.

This page summarises published court decisions for information. It is not legal advice and the summaries are not a substitute for reading the decisions. Admissibility and weight are always for the court. If a summary is inaccurate, tell us at legal@instantproof.legal and we will correct it.

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