Victims’ Rights and Criminal Justice Reform: A Critical Assessment of Victim-Centered Approaches

Abstract

The position of the victims in the criminal justice systems was marginal, and they were mostly limited to the status of the witnesses during the whole twentieth century, when the state-offender relations reigned supreme. However, since the 1970s, an important paradigmatic change has been taking place which has been contributed by the rights-of-the-victims movement, the changing human rights discourses and the increasing awareness of the shortcomings of offender-based models of justice. This paper critically analyses the birth and convergence of victim-centered justice, its historical development, normative context, and the broadening of it in the context of domestic and international criminal justice systems. The paper examines the acceptance of the rights of the victims to protection, participation, information, dignity and reparations in a formal manner, outlining the important legal and procedural milestones, such as the powerful structure of the International Criminal Court. It also addresses the thorny relationship between the increased victim involvement and the structural and doctrinal guarantees of the fundamental due process in the context of the provision of the procedural agency to the victim under the adversarial systems. Restorative justice is explored as an alternative victim-based system that focuses on repairing harm, responsibility, and an inclusive conversation as it works together with the formal criminal justice systems. Using interdisciplinary literature, the article evaluates in a critical manner the assumptions of the theory, structural constraints, and ambiguities of victim-centered justice in an empirical manner. It raises the dangers of homogenizing the needs of victims, re-creating the power imbalances in institutions, and modifying the participation into a purely symbolic recognition instead of substantive impact. The article provides a conclusion that as much as victim-centered justice can be a dramatic normative development, its success requires the context-specific, enforceable, and empirical-founded systems that have the potential to really empower victims without compromising the rights of the accused and the actuality of criminal justice.