International Frameworks for Victim Rights

Criminal procedure through most of the twentieth century was built around two parties: the state and the accused. The victim supplied testimony and then largely disappeared from the process, with no formal right to be told what happened to the case, no guaranteed voice at sentencing, and no reliable route to recover losses.

Criminologists writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, building on the emerging field of victimology, argued that this arrangement treated the victim as a witness rather than a party with interests of their own.

The pressure built through a series of regional instruments that predated the UN text. The Council of Europe adopted a convention on compensation for victims of violent crime in 1983, and several national compensation schemes, including Britain's and New Zealand's, had existed since the 1960s. What was missing was a statement broad enough to bind the conversation at the UN level and give reform advocates in poorer states a text to point to.

The Seventh UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, held in Milan in 1985, produced the draft that the General Assembly adopted that November as resolution 40/34. The drafters deliberately used the word basic principles rather than rights in the title, a choice that signalled the document's status: it was meant to guide domestic reform, not to create obligations a state could be sued over.

The Declaration's reach went beyond ordinary crime. It responded to lobbying from groups representing victims of state violence and corruption, who argued that a person harmed by an abuse of official power had no less claim to recognition than a person harmed by an ordinary offender, even though the harm often had no criminal offence attached to it at all.

The Milan congress mattered for a second reason: it gave developing states, many of which had no dedicated victim legislation at all, a shared reference text rather than a set of scattered national models to borrow from piecemeal.

A resolution adopted by consensus at the UN General Assembly carries a kind of authority that a single country's statute does not, since a domestic reformer can point to it as evidence of a settled international standard rather than one country's local policy choice, which made it easier to justify new spending on courts, legal aid, and victim support offices to a finance ministry that had never budgeted for any of it before.

The word emerged is worth pausing on, because the 1985 text was not the starting point of victim-centred thinking, only its first global consolidation. Local reforms, victim support charities in the United Kingdom, and pilot compensation boards in parts of North America and Australasia had been running for two decades by then, and the drafters at Milan were compiling and generalising practices that already existed somewhere, not inventing them from a blank page.

The Declaration organises victims of crime around four linked pillars, and later instruments largely reuse this structure even when they rename the pieces. The first is access to justice and fair treatment: victims should be treated with compassion and respect, informed of their role in proceedings and of the scope, timing and progress of the case, and allowed to present their views at stages where their personal interests are affected, without prejudice to the accused's rights.

The second pillar is restitution: offenders, or parties responsible for their conduct, should make fair restitution to victims, their families, or dependants, covering the return of property, payment for harm or loss, reimbursement of expenses, and provision of services. States are urged to make restitution an available sentencing option, not only a private civil remedy the victim must separately pursue.

The third pillar is compensation, which the Declaration distinguishes from restitution by source: when the offender or other sources cannot fully compensate the victim, the Declaration calls on states to endeavour to provide financial compensation themselves, at least in cases of serious crime resulting in significant bodily injury, and to encourage the establishment of national funds for this purpose where none exist.

The fourth pillar is assistance: victims should receive material, medical, psychological, and social assistance, delivered through governmental, voluntary, and community channels, with personnel trained to respond to victims sensitively. Read together, the four pillars move a victim from being a source of evidence to being a person with a recognised set of needs running from the moment of the offence through to its resolution.

The four pillars are cumulative rather than a menu a state can pick from selectively. A jurisdiction that pays compensation but never tells the victim when a hearing is scheduled has satisfied the third pillar while failing the first, and a jurisdiction that keeps a victim informed but offers no route to restitution or a state fund has done the reverse.

Later instruments, including the EU Directive and the US statute discussed later in this topic, tend to bundle several pillars into a single enforceable list precisely to close this kind of gap, rather than treating each pillar as a separate, optional programme a legislature might adopt on its own timetable.

The four pillars also leave out something concrete: the Declaration says nothing about a victim's right to veto a plea bargain, to demand a particular sentence, or to overturn an acquittal, and later instruments modelled on it are equally careful to frame participation as a right to be heard rather than a right to decide. This limit was deliberate: the drafters wanted victims recognised inside the process without converting the state's prosecution into a private dispute the victim controls.

Part B of the 1985 Declaration is easy to overlook because most domestic courses on victimology teach only the crime-victim half, yet it does separate, deliberate work.

It defines victims of abuse of power as persons who suffer harm through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute a violation of national criminal law, but that do violate internationally recognised norms relating to human rights, typically because the harm was caused by, or with the acquiescence of, state officials acting under colour of law.

The drafters had in mind situations such as unlawful detention, torture carried out by state agents, and large-scale corruption that drains public funds meant for essential services, none of which are always criminalised in the country where they occur, especially where the officials responsible also control the prosecuting authority. The Declaration calls on states to consider incorporating norms into domestic law that prohibit such abuses and provide remedies, including restitution and compensation, to those harmed.

The practical effect of this part has been much weaker than Part A. Ordinary crime-victim compensation schemes now exist in dozens of countries, but a state rarely legislates a domestic remedy against its own abuse of power on the strength of a non-binding UN resolution alone.

Where remedies for state abuse have developed, they have generally come through separate routes such as constitutional tort claims, human rights commissions, or international human rights bodies, rather than through statutes that cite the 1985 Declaration by name.

The distinction still matters analytically. It tells a student that victim rights law was never conceived as covering only street crime; the drafters saw the ordinary offender and the abusive official as two points on the same continuum of harm requiring a state response, even though only the first point produced durable legislation in most countries.

This gap between the two halves of the Declaration also explains a recurring criticism of the instrument from human rights scholars: a text that names abuse of power as equivalent in principle to ordinary crime, but relies entirely on voluntary state adoption for its remedy, offers little to a person harmed by the very government that would have to enact the remedy.

Domestic anti-corruption statutes and human rights commissions have filled part of this space in some countries, but rarely by citing the 1985 text as their source.

A comparative course still teaches Part B for a practical reason: it is the clause most often invoked when a domestic victim rights statute is criticised for excluding a category of harm. Advocates for victims of custodial violence or enforced disappearance, for instance, regularly cite the abuse-of-power language to argue that a compensation scheme drafted only for ordinary crime, such as India's Section 396, leaves a recognised category of victim without the remedy the 1985 text anticipated for them.

A non-binding declaration only changes outcomes if it is later converted into an instrument that a court can enforce. The clearest regional conversion came from the European Union. The EU had already adopted a framework decision on victims in criminal proceedings in 2001, but member states implemented it unevenly, so in 2012 the Union replaced it with Directive 2012/29/EU, commonly called the EU Victims' Directive, adopted on 25 October 2012.

Unlike the 1985 Declaration, a directive is binding: member states had until November 2015 to transpose its minimum standards into national law, and the European Commission can pursue infringement proceedings against a state that fails to do so.

The Directive covers the same ground as the Declaration's first two pillars in much greater procedural detail: a right to understand and be understood, a right to information from the first contact with a competent authority, a right to interpretation and translation, a right to be heard, rights during the criminal investigation, and access to victim support services and, where relevant, restorative justice services, with an individual needs assessment to identify victims who need special protection.

The United States took a different route: a federal statute rather than a directive. The Crime Victims' Rights Act was enacted in 2004 as part of the Justice for All Act and is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3771.

It lists specific enforceable rights for victims in federal criminal cases, including the right to reasonable, accurate, and timely notice of proceedings, the right to not be excluded from public court proceedings, the right to be reasonably heard at release, plea, or sentencing, and the right to full and timely restitution. Critically, the statute gives victims standing to assert these rights directly and to petition an appellate court for a writ of mandamus if a district court denies them.

The contrast is instructive. The EU Directive binds twenty-seven states through a supranational enforcement mechanism; the CVRA binds federal courts within one country through a private right of action written directly into the statute. Both nonetheless trace their substance back to the same 1985 pillars: information, participation, protection, and restitution or compensation.

The two instruments also differ in scope of application. The EU Directive sets a floor that every member state's own criminal code must meet or exceed, so a victim in any of the twenty-seven states can expect the same minimum notice and participation rights regardless of which national court hears the case.

The CVRA, by contrast, applies only to federal criminal prosecutions in the United States; most American criminal cases are actually tried in state courts, which instead rely on a patchwork of state-level victims' rights statutes and, in many states, victims' rights amendments written into the state constitution itself.

India ratified no separate victim-rights treaty tied to the 1985 Declaration, and its statutory response arrived gradually through amendment rather than a single victims' act. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, originally allowed a court to order compensation payable by a convicted offender under Section 357, which functions closer to the Declaration's restitution pillar since the money comes from the offender, not the state.

The state-funded compensation pillar arrived later. The Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 2008, inserted Section 357A into the CrPC, in force from 31 December 2009, directing every state government, in coordination with the central government, to prepare a victim compensation scheme funded to compensate a victim, or their dependants, who has suffered loss or injury and requires rehabilitation, including in cases where the offender is not traced or convicted. The provision followed the 2003 Malimath Committee report on criminal justice reform, which had recommended a statutory compensation fund independent of conviction.

The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, replaced the CrPC when it came into force on 1 July 2024, and it carried the victim compensation scheme forward as Section 396, preserving the substance of the earlier provision: state governments must still frame a scheme in coordination with the centre, and courts may still recommend compensation for a victim's loss or injury and refer serious cases to the state authority even before conviction.

The renumbering matters procedurally for anyone citing the provision in a filing made after mid-2024, but the entitlement it creates is continuous with the 2009 scheme rather than a new right.

What India has never enacted is a codified list of procedural rights comparable to the EU Directive or the US CVRA, such as an enforceable right to notice of hearing dates or a private right of action against a court that denies a victim's request to be heard.

Victims can apply to a District or State Legal Services Authority for compensation once a scheme exists, and can approach a court for restitution under general provisions, but no single statute bundles information rights, participation rights, and protection rights the way the 2012 Directive does.

The practical route for an Indian victim therefore looks different from the route the EU Directive describes. Rather than a single enforceable checklist, a victim typically moves between several separate mechanisms: the trial court for a restitution order at sentencing, the State Legal Services Authority for a compensation award under the state's Section 396 scheme, and, in cases involving custodial abuse or other conduct by a public official, a writ petition or a complaint to the National or a State Human Rights Commission, since ordinary criminal courts rarely have jurisdiction to award damages against the state itself.

Set the four jurisdictions side by side and a common design vocabulary appears even though the binding force differs sharply. Every instrument recognises a right to information about case status, a right to participate at some stage short of full party status, a right to protection from intimidation or repeat victimisation, and a right to compensation or restitution.

This is not a coincidence: the EU Directive's drafters and the US statute's drafters both cite the 1985 Declaration as background, so the vocabulary migrated even where the enforcement mechanism did not.

The gap between declaration and delivery shows up in three recurring places. The first is standing: a right written into a statute is only as strong as a victim's ability to go to court when it is denied. The US CVRA is unusual precisely because it gives victims a mandamus route; India's Section 396 gives no comparable route to compel a reluctant court to consider compensation.

The second is funding: a compensation scheme that exists on paper but is chronically underfunded at the state level produces long queues and partial payouts, a documented problem with several Indian state schemes under Section 357A and its successor, and one the 1985 Declaration anticipated by urging states to establish national funds rather than leaving payment to case-by-case budget allocation.

The third is implementation delay: the EU gave member states a three-year transposition window for the 2012 Directive and still had to open infringement proceedings against states that missed it, showing that even a binding regional instrument does not guarantee timely domestic effect.

A fourth, quieter gap sits underneath these three: awareness. A right that a victim never learns exists cannot be exercised regardless of how well it is funded or enforced elsewhere in the system.

Legal aid clinics, victim support charities, and, in India, the District Legal Services Authorities exist partly to close this gap, since the 1985 Declaration and its successors all assume a victim who already knows to ask, an assumption that holds far more reliably for a victim represented by counsel than for one working through the process alone.

None of the four systems eliminates this gap entirely, which is why comparative victimology treats the 1985 Declaration as a floor for the vocabulary of victim rights rather than a guarantee of the remedy attached to it.

The same gap is a reason victim-centred reform increasingly looks toward restorative processes alongside, not instead of, formal compensation schemes, since a face-to-face or facilitated dialogue with the offender can deliver acknowledgement and information faster than a court calendar or a compensation fund's disbursement cycle ever will.