Victim Reparation and the International Criminal Court

Abstract

Victimology emerged soon after World War II, which was characterised by genocide and crimes against humanity. The horrors that occurred during this war led to the development of the first international criminal tribunal, the Nuremburg Tribunal, at which 20 former Nazi leaders — civil servants and military personal — stood trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Despite this temporal correlation between the war and the emergence of victimology, the early victimologists did not address victims of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Instead they focused on conventional crimes such as homicide. Early victimologists, authors like Benjamin Mendelsohn, Hans von Hentig and Marvin Wolfgang, tried to explain crime by examining the role of the victim (Wemmers, 2003). By the late 1970s, influenced by the mass disappearances of civilians in several Latin American countries, some victimologists began to draw attention to victims of political crimes (Schafer, 1977). A classic article in this respect is Robert Elias' seminal paper: Transcending our Social Reality of Victimization: Toward a New Victimology of Human Rights, which was published in 1985. In it, Elias argued in favour of widening the scope of victimology from what Bienkowska (1992) refers to as penal victimology, which focuses on conventional crimes, to a victimology of human rights. Elias believed that as long as victimology focused uniquely on crimes defined in a nation's criminal code, it could never be critical and independent of the state. In order for victimology to not be a mere tool of the establishment and for it to develop as a legitimate and independent science it had to be released from the shackles of the criminal code and focus on human rights violations. A milestone in the evolution of victimology and its recognition of victims of gross violations of human rights was the adoption of the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power by the General International Review of Victimology. 2009, Vol. 16, pp. 123–126 0269-7580/09 $10 © A B Academic Publishers Printed in Great Britain