This book analyses the rights of crime victims within a human rights paradigm, and describes the inconsistencies resulting from attempts to introduce the procedural rights of victims within a criminal justice system that views crime as a matter between the state and the offender, and not as one involving the victim. To remedy this problem, the book calls for abandoning the concept of crime as an infringement of a state’s criminal laws and instead reinterpreting it as a violation of human rights. The state’s right to punish the offender would then be replaced by the rights of victims to see those responsible for violating their human rights convicted and punished and by the rights of offenders to be treated as accountable agents.

A critical examination of the dramatic changes in criminal justice over the last two decades and the first full-length study of the law and politics of criminal justice in the era of the Charter and victims? rights.

Victimology and Criminal Law is a major contribution to the development and the influence of victimology in the world. In certain concrete situations, one must consider not only the perpetrator of the crime, but that the victim, even though presumably innocent, may have the sensation of being an intruder. In this book, Professor Edmundo Oliveira offers a clear and comprehensive overview of the historical, conceptual, legal, and practice oriented aspects of victimology. He specifically focuses on psychology and penal law as they relate to the survivor of the crime, by highlighting themes of personal blame, provocation, participation and diminished responsibility. The path of victimization is fully analyzed in detail within this study. Victimologists and criminologists dedicate themselves to studying the polemical, controversial challenges and intense issues raised by delinquency as a whole. This book is a significant advance, emphasizing a different role for the victim. Academics, practitioners, law students, and professionals will find this book useful as a springboard for enlightening debates that will lead to new approaches on intervention for survivors of crime.

Most discourses on victims in international criminal justice take the subject of victims for granted, as an identity and category existing exogenously to the judicial process. This book takes a different approach. Through a close reading of the institutional practices of one particular court, it demonstrates how court practices produce the subjectivity of the victim, a subjectivity that is profoundly of law and endogenous to the enterprise of international criminal justice. Furthermore, by situating these figurations within the larger aspirations of the court, the book shows how victims have come to constitute and represent the link between international criminal law and the enterprise of transitional justice. The book takes as its primary example the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as it is also called. Focusing on the representation of victims in crimes against humanity, victim participation and photographic images, the book engages with a range of debates and scholarship in law, feminist theory and cultural legal theory. Furthermore, by paying attention to a broader range of institutional practices, Figuring Victims makes an innovative scholarly contribution to the debates on the roles and purposes of international criminal justice.

"Don't blame the victim" is a cornerstone maxim of Anglo-American jurisprudence, but should the law generally ignore a victim's behavior in determining a defendant's liability? Victims' Rights and Victims' Wrongs criticizes the current criminal law approach and outlines a more fair, coherent, and efficient set of rules to recognize that victims sometimes co-author their own losses or injuries. Evaluating a number of controversial cases involving euthanasia, sadomasochism, date rape, battered wives, and "innocent" aggressors, Vera Bergelson builds a theoretical foundation for reform. Her approach to comparative criminal liability takes into account the actions of both the perpetrator and the victim and offers a unitary explanation for consent, self-defense, and provocation. This innovative book supplies a practical and coherent mechanism for evaluating the impact of a victim's conduct on a perpetrator's liability in a variety of circumstances, including those that are now artificially excluded from comparative analysis.