Summary: Victims of International Crimes

The aim of this book was to provide a detailed overview of the different mechanisms that exist in offering modes of participation in criminal prosecution to the victims of mass atrocities at an international level. The book has outlined the victims’ system enshrined in the Rome Statute and compared it to the existing practice of victim participation in several other national and international circumstances. It has now been almost two decades since victims of international crimes were first granted access to courts and tribunals allowing them to participate and express their suffering, concerns and interests in key international criminal trials. Victim-oriented movements throughout the world in the mid-1980s began to challenge the original purely perpetrator-oriented approach of modern enlightened thinking in criminal procedure. New forms of involvement for the victims of crime in criminal procedures have allowed them to take part in the criminal process separately and actively. The role of victims has been politically tightened inside and outside of the criminal justice system. However, despite national developments aimed at strengthening the role of the victim, the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia did not take into account the distinction between victims and the witnesses. Accordingly, victims of crimes in these conflicts have never been given the opportunity to participate actively in an international trial or to voice their concerns before a trial chamber. This was changed with the “new era” of international criminal mechanisms, including the ICC, the ECCC, the STL and the Kosovo Chambers, in which the victims were taken into account as genuine subjects in the proceedings.