ABSTRACT

Recourse to legal frameworks that identify and provide rights or powers for victims of crime is made functional only by their relationship to a policy context that makes sense of and provides a means of accessing those rights, for all justice stakeholders. The complexity of victim rights for most jurisdictions results from the lack of a singular consolidating instrument, because victim rights and powers often necessarily span different sources of law and policy to account for different provisions and levels of access to justice depending on the harm suffered. Further complexity and ambiguity are added where victim rights manifest only in a policy context, because a particular member state or signatory has failed to ratify or provided only for partial ratification of the enforceable standard pursuant to the international convention. The context of victim rights operating through a particular legal and policy milieu at the local level of the individual jurisdiction is therefore significant to the operationalising of victim rights as they manifest across international and regional human rights discourses and norms down to the local, domestic level of the criminal justice system of each state.