International criminal law and victims’ rights

Prosecuting international crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Using victim participation as a tool to enhance the rule of law and to tackle impunity

“…123 A total of 90 victims applied, and were subsequently granted approval, to participate as civil parties, with some commentators noting that 'neither the defence nor the prosecution challenged victim participation rights … proceed [ing] with little judicial intervention'. 124 The second case, originally a joint case against the four most senior living members of the Khmer Rouge regime, Co-Prosecutors v Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, 125 was much larger in scope, with over 4 000 victims applying for civil party status of whom, in the end, 3 866 were successfully admitted. 126 In both cases, victims granted civil party status have exercised numerous participatory rights.…”

Victims and Transitional Justice

“…At first blush, the centrality of human rights discourses to the evolution of contemporary transitional justice would suggest that the ‘rights of victims’ would play a much more significant role than is actually the case. In practice, however, as Ferstman (2010: 407) has argued, if we trace the treatment of victims from the tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, through the ICTY, ICTR, the Special Court for Sierra Leone to the ICC, until recently ‘ … only sparse consideration was given to victims views and concerns and only limited space was given to their engagement with such institutions other than as prosecution witnesses ’. The ICTY and the ICTR had only limited powers to deal with victim reparations (and these proved hard to invoke) and both institutions were frequently criticised for a range of failures concerning their treatment of victims during the conduct of their trials (e.g.…”