ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses victims of serious international crimes who participate in trial proceedings either as victim-witnesses; civil parties in the civil law tradition; or as "victim participants" as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The establishment of the UN ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s brought new challenges for victims and witnesses and court personnel who interacted with them. Mass atrocity cases can generate a huge number of victims, making it infeasible to include large numbers of them as witnesses or victim participants. Kenyan victims had expressed optimism about the prospects for justice and accountability when the court opened investigations in 2010, but their faith in the court began to wane as prosecutions faltered and then collapsed. The growth of victims' rights, from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to the ICC, has redirected attention from legal accountability to victim inclusion and reparative justice.
