The Victim S Song

Discusses the murder of a twenty-two year old music student who was robbed, stabbed in the back, and then thrown on the tracks of a New York City subway, where he died. The author, Eric's mother, gives a powerful account of this senseless tragedy, the continuing pain she suffers, and the inadequacies of our flawed criminal justice system.

What does it mean to be a victim? How can we better listen to and learn from the experiences of those whose human rights have been violated? This book addresses questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of appeals to victims' stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals. Meyers takes an interdisciplinary approach to considering how victims' stories can contribute to enlarged understandings of human rights protections and deepened commitments to realizing human rights.

This book canvasses the autonomous position of victims before the International Criminal Court. It seeks to provide an objective and balanced perspective, and neither rejects the idea of victims’ participation or seeks to extend it beyond the contours determined by the founders of the ICC.

This important new book on criminology is a major attempt to evaluate actual victim compensation programs as well as their political and economic contexts, through the eyes of the victims themselves.Elias traces the experiences of violent-crime victims throughout the entire criminal justice process, comparing New York's and New Jersey's victim compensation programs. He shows how programs differ when compensation is viewed essentially as welfare and when it is viewed as a right. The study uses extensive interviews with officials and with violent crime victims.The study indicates victim compensation programs largely fail to achieve their stated goals of improving attitudes toward the criminal-justice system and the government. The programs produce poor attitudes toward government and criminal justice.

The relationship between politics and law in the early People’s Republic of China was highly contentious. Periods of intentionally excessive campaign justice intersected with attempts to carve out professional standards of adjudication and to offer retroactive justice for those deemed to have been unjustly persecuted. How were victims and perpetrators defined and dealt with during different stages of the Maoist era and beyond? How was law practiced, understood, and contested in local contexts? This volume adopts a case study approach to shed light on these complex questions. By way of a close reading of original case files from the grassroots level, the contributors detail procedures and question long-held assumptions, not least about the Cultural Revolution as a period of “lawlessness.”

This book is a guide to the law and practice of victims’ roles before the International Criminal Court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The various chapters focus on the provisions relevant to victim participation at these courts and the case law interpreting and applying those provisions. The book thus informs the reader on the principal ways in which the relevant practice is developing, the distinct avenues taken in the application of similar provisions as well as the ensuing advantages and challenges. Unlike other volumes focusing on relevant academic literature, this volume is written mainly by practitioners and is addressed to those lawyers, legal advisers and victimologists who work or wish to work in the field of victim participation in international criminal justice. Kinga Tibori-Szabó is legal officer for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague and has previously worked for the Legal Representative of Victims at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Megan Hirst is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London and has worked on victims' participation issues in the Registries of the International Criminal Court and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, as well as in an LRV team in Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen.