Overview
- Explores how the adoption of adversarial systems in Latin America has affected victims’ rights by specifically analyzing the Colombian criminal justice reform
- Sheds vital new light on the understanding of victims’ rights in criminal proceedings
- Provides a unique treatment for readers interested in victims’ rights in the criminal process, employing a range of theoretical traditions and tools
- Presents an innovative, empirical assessment of the rights of crime victims following the adversarial criminal justice reform in Colombia
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice (IUSGENT, volume 62)
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Table of contents (4 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
By the early 2000s, it seemed that the Colombian criminal justice system was headed towards a process characterized by broader victim participation, primarily because of the doctrine of the Constitutional Court on victims’ rights. But in 2002, the Colombian Attorney General promoted a more adversarial criminal justice reform. This book argues that this reform represented a sudden and unpredicted reversal of the Constitutional Court’s doctrine on victim participation, even though one of the central justifications for the reform was the need to satisfy human rights standards and adhere to the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on victims’ rights. In the criminal justice reform of the early 2000s and its subsequent modifications, the promotion of a dichotomous interpretation of the adversarial model—which conceived the criminal process as a competition between prosecution and defense—served to limit victim participation.
This study examines how conceptions of victims’ rights emerged out of the struggles between different and at times competing agendas. In the Colombian process of reform, victims’ rights have been invoked both as a justification for criminal sanctions and as an explanation for crime prevention and restorative justice. After assessing quantitative and qualitative data, this book concludes thatpunitive approaches to victims’ rights have prevailed over restorative justice perspectives. Furthermore, it argues that punitiveness in the criminal justice system has not resulted in more protection for victims. Ultimately, this research reveals that the adversarial criminal justice reform of the early 2000s has not substantially improved the protection of victims’ rights in Colombia.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Victims’ Rights in Flux: Criminal Justice Reform in Colombia
Authors: Astrid Liliana Sánchez-Mejía
Series Title: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59852-9
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-59851-2Published: 24 July 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-86718-2Published: 03 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-59852-9Published: 13 July 2017
Series ISSN: 1534-6781
Series E-ISSN: 2214-9902
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 265
Number of Illustrations: 42 b/w illustrations
Topics: Human Rights, Human Rights and Crime , Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law, Social Justice, Equality and Human Rights, Constitutional Law