Extra-Curial Rights, Declarations and the Rise of the Commissioner of Victim Rights

Abstract

The relocation of the victim in common law systems of justice has occurred through various reforms to the law and policy process. The provision of differential rights across service, participatory, and enforceable or substantive rights has been largely facilitated by the introduction of charters or declarations of rights that set out these rights. The provision of rights through a charter or declaration is designed to meet the 1985 PJVC (Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power) and other international instruments considered in Chap. 1. However, these documents are an innovative policy approach to the recognition of victims and what implies a compromise in the context of the normative assumptions inherent in the adversarial criminal trial. This compromise is the allocation of rights for victims in a system of justice where to talk of victim rights appears antithetical to the normative assumptions of adversarial justice. These assumptions talk of the rights of the defendant, the state, and the courts, and the agents who work for and within them—lawyers, the police, the prosecution, and the judiciary. To talk of victim rights in a system that denies the standing of the victim as a party participant is contradictory and controversial. The answer is to house victim rights in such a way as to render them compatible, or perhaps tolerable, with a system that identifies the victim as beyond the normative scope of the criminal trial.