ABSTRACT
At the international level, the United Nations Declaration of basic principles has formed the conceptual rationale for national developments in Asia over the last twenty years. Until recently, support for victims in Asian countries lacked any sort of formalised comprehensive approach. Korea is one of almost a hundred countries across the globe that have recently transformed autocratic rule into a democracy. As with many of its peers in the current, third wave of democratisation, democracy in Korea evolved out of a military dictatorship. One of the curiosities of the literature on recent reforms to victim-policy in Japan is its framing as part of a generalised harsh citizen-driven criminal policy a process referred to in Japanese as genbatsuka. Indeed this generalised trope continues to exist in spite of there being little unequivocal evidence of harshness from recent criminal policy reforms in Japan.
