Epilogue: For a Charter of Rights for Crime Victims

Abstract

Prisoners’ rights were established about 10 years ago, in Quebec as in North America and Europe. These rights are not always respected and the fight to have them upheld must be taken up over and over again. But the breach has been made and the system of criminal justice should take it into account from now on. Three recent events illustrate the credibility of this movement in Canada: (a) in 1980, the Canadian government and the Department of the Solicitor General published a ‘manual’ of prisoners’ rights; (b) the Quebec government and the Department of Justice, in a ‘green paper’ on correctional policy, recognized the rights of prisoners in 1981; (c) the ‘Ligue des droits et libertés’ of Quebec and the ‘Office des droits des détenus’ proposed a ‘Charter’ of prisoners’ rights which was ratified in 1982 during the congress of the International Federation of Human Rights. This movement, moreover, has an international background, starting with the ‘Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners’ adopted by the first congress of the United Nations Organization on the ‘Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders’ at Geneva, in 1955, to the remarkable recent work of Amnesty International.