The Topic:
"Victim-centered Criminal Justice"

A victim-centered approach urges institutional guarantee to minimize the re-traumatization of victims in criminal investigations and empowers victims as participants and beneficiaries in the criminal procedure. It brings new views to the criminal justice process and transformation to the affected community and the entire society. Such new approach in criminal law is becoming a new trend in investigation and reparation phases at both domestic and international legal discourse.

Victim-centered approach is especially important in relation to investigations on sexual crimes and where the victims are children. In December 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a policy on a victim-centered approach in its response to sexual misconduct. Criminal investigations and information gathering into war crimes allegedly being committed in Ukraine has created a new dimension in criminal investigations, where repeated interviews by multi-national investigators, journalists and human rights reporters from all over the world may overburden victims and thus undermine the credibility of testimony. Against this background, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Eurojust published practical guidelines for documenting and preserving information on international crimes in September 2022.

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The victim-centered approach may bring dramatic changes in determining the forms of sanction and reparation. The concept of restorative justice has evolved into an innovative means to bring peace and forgiveness to the community harmed by crimes. Reconciliation programs are now incorporated in many countries’ justice systems and comparative research on this field is ever-increasingly encouraged. Regional Human Rights mechanisms accelerate the promotion of norms and practice of States’ duty to enhance right to remedy. At the international level, the Trial Chamber VI of the ICC declared in the 2021 Ntaganda reparation decision that a victim-centered approach should guide its reparations proceedings. Victims are now invited to community talks to discuss what they really want and what would work for future generations to overcome the past.

While the victim-centered approach appears to be an important value in various criminal process steps compared to the traditional crime-centered (or perpetrator-centered) approach, the impact that this concept may bring to fair trials needs to be treated with caution. Cherry-picking incriminating evidence and limiting investigations to avoid re-traumatization require appropriate safeguards to maintain effective investigation. The balance between the rights of the accused and the victims’ rights requires an institutional guarantee of procedural justice for both parties.

The aim of this conference is to discuss the prospects and problems of this new approach of victim-centering in criminal law. It pays special attention to the global issues of the current era, such as the domestic violence cases increased under the lockdown, sexual trafficking escalated under the re-opening of state borders at the end of the pandemic, and the multi-national investigatory effort against war crimes that have been reported one after another following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The need for information sharing and evidence collection promotion and management through international cooperation is significantly increasing, and theoretical and practical problems need new ideas to bring fair and just criminal proceedings and their outcomes.