By Tyrone Kirchengast

This book brings together the diverse and fragmented rights and powers of victims constitutive of the modern adversarial criminal trial as found across the common law jurisdictions of the world. One characteristic of victim rights as they emerge within and constitute aspects of the modern criminal trial is that they are dispersed within an existing criminal process that largely identifies the offender as the benefactor of due process rights, originating in the seventeenth-century adversarial criminal trial. This trial increasingly excluded the victim for the Crown and state, and the role of the victim was slowly eroded to that of witness for the prosecution as the adversarial trial matured into the latter part of the twentieth century. Increasing awareness of the removal of the victim and the need to secure the rights and interests of victims as stakeholders of justice resulted in the last decade of the twentieth century, bearing witness to the gradual relocation of the victim in common law and statute. This relocation has occurred, however, in a highly fragmented and disconnected way, usually following spontaneous and at times ill thought-out law reform initiatives that may or may not connect to the spirit of existing reforms, foundational structures of the criminal process, or international or domestic rights frameworks that have emerged in the meantime.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 360p.