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Giving Victims a Voice: On the Problems of Introducing Victim Impact Statements in German Criminal Procedure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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Historically, victims of crimes were key participants in the prosecution of crimes around the globe. Over the centuries, however, as public police and prosecution service took over the prosecution of criminal acts, the importance of victims in criminal justice systems decreased in common law and civil law countries alike. The victim was sidelined and the victim's role was reduced to that of a witness for the prosecution. As one of the first scholars to comment on the absence of victims from the criminal justice system, William Frank McDonald referred to the victim as “the forgotten man” in criminal procedure.

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Developments
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Copyright © 2013 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 See generally Heather Strang, Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice (2002); see also Peter Becker, Eine kurze Einführung in die Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte 13 (2011).Google Scholar

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7 Resolution, supra note 6, § 3. Germany, in comparison to Australia, is also obligated to implement the victims’ right to be heard under art. 10 EU Directive 2012/29/EU of 25 Oct. 2012 in national law. Australia, however, is under no such obligation. This paper therefore focuses on the above-mentioned Declaration as an overarching framework for both States. Although the Declaration is legally non-binding on Member States, a Declaration in UN practice creates a “strong expectation that Members of the international community will abide by it.” See Memorandum of the Office of Legal Affairs, UN Secretariat, UN ESCOR, 34th session, support no 8, [15], UN Document No E/CN.4/L610 quoted in Dinah Shelton, Compliance with International Human Rights Soft Law, 29 Studies in Transnational Legal Policy 119, 126–27 (1997).Google Scholar

8 These rights will be discussed in greater detail in part C of this paper. Victims in Germany are traditionally referred to by law as “aggrieved persons.” See 5th book Strafprozessordnung (German Code of Criminal Procedure) (“StPO”) entitled “Participation of the Aggrieved Person in Criminal Proceedings.” Riess explains that the term “aggrieved person” has traditionally been used in criminal procedure in Germany, while the term “victim” has been introduced and used since the debates on the role of the “victim” in criminal procedure in the mid 1980s in Germany. In his opinion, the term “victim” is related to a criminological-victimological point of view not considering the defendant or the crime but solely the victim. He concludes, however, that it is impossible to separate the terms from each other because the terms both refer to the same subject, and the role of the aggrieved person in criminal procedure cannot be defined without considering the victimologic side of things. See Peter Riess, Der Strafprozess und der Verletzte - eine Zwischenbilanz JURA 281, 281–82 (1987).Google Scholar

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31 Id. § 397 (1).Google Scholar

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47 Strafprozessordnung [StPO] [Code of Criminal Procedure], Apr. 7, 1987, § 69(1). Victims in Germany without a special role have certain rights bestowed upon them, such as: the right to receive information on particular events (§406d, 406h StPO), the right to inspect court files under certain circumstances (§ 406e StPO) and the right to be legally represented either as a witness when testifying (§ 406f StPO) or as a victim eligible to participate as a Private Accessory Prosecutor but refusing to do so (§ 406g StPO). However, this paper focuses exclusively on the right to present views and concerns as a victim at trial and does not explore other victim related rights in Germany. This has been done by others elsewhere. See Hans Joachim Schneider, Die Gegenwärtige Situation der Verbrechensopfer in Deutschland: Eine Wissenschaftliche Bilanz, 57 Juristen Zeitung 231 (2002); see also Joachim Hermann, Die Entwicklung des Opferschutzes im Deutschen Strafrecht und Strafprozessrecht- eine Unendliche Geschichte, 3 Zeitschrift für Internationale Strafrechtsdogmatik 236 (2010).Google Scholar

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