Th is 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 identifi es the off ender as the benefactor of due process rights,
originating in the seventeenth-century adversarial criminal trial. Th is 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. Th is 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.