Victimology and Victim Rights ─ International Comparative Perspectives

This book provides an international comparative analysis of victim rights' frameworks. The text presents comparative materials on victim rights, laws and policies in Australia, the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Japan, and South Africa, Brazil and includes the continental European approaches, for example, the inquisitorial countries of Germany and France are compared with the mixed adversarial and inquisitorial systems of Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights is seminal as a stand-alone body of work on the rights of victims, and as it applies to the existing legal record of the countries examined. International law, specifically the rights of victims before the International Criminal Court, and before tribunals such as those in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, are also covered. The main argument advanced by this book is that there is increasing international convergence regarding the integration and support of the victim in both law and policy. Boundaries which were once cited as distinguishing one system of justice from another – adversarial versus inquisitorial, constitutional versus common law, code versus common law – are being slowly dismantled by statutory and policy amendment to afford victims a greater role in government decision-making, in legal proceedings, as community stakeholders, and as individuals with enforceable rights.

Dr Tyrone Kirchengast is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at UNSW. He is admitted as a legal practitioner of the Supreme Court of NSW and is a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of Australia. Before joining the Faculty of Law, he lectured at the University of Newcastle, and Macquarie University, Australia. His principal teaching and research interests are in criminal law and procedure and his publications focus on the integration of victim interests within criminal law. His recent work focuses on the role of victim impact statements in sentencing homicide offenders; the rise of victim lawyers and the integration of victims into adversarial proceedings; and victim rights as human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights and before the International Criminal Court. He has published widely on victim rights.