La Cour pénale internationale s’est penchée récemment sur la question nouvelle de la réparation des préjudices transgénérationnels. Dans son analyse, la cour s’appuie sur un type de préjudice qui dépasse la victime immédiate et qui en vise une qui n’a vécu l’événement traumatique original, que par l’entremise d’un transfert générationnel. En ce qui concerne la réparation, il faut établir si ce préjudice est spécifique et autonome justifiant une reconnaissance et, par conséquent, une mesure de réparation. La question de réparer un préjudice transgénérationnel est d’actualité et encore peu étudiée en droit pénal international. Le présent article vise à apporter une contribution dans ce domaine en examinant la façon dont le préjudice transgénérationnel est juridiquement élaboré dans certains exemples s’inscrivant dans un contexte de violations massives et graves des droits humains. Enfin, l’article analyse la jurisprudence de la Cour pénale internationale, mettant en lumière les difficultés et les dilemmes générés par la reconnaissance des préjudices transgénérationnels dans la sphère juridique pénale.

Globally, questions have been asked on how police utilized additional powers created to manage the spread of the COVID-19 virus without negatively impacting police legitimacy. This was particularly a concern in countries that had hitherto recorded high incidents of police misconduct prior to the emergence of the pandemic. Using a victim-centered approach, a qualitative study was conducted to examine the dimensions of unlawful use of force, human rights violations, and other police misconduct which prevailed during the enforcement of the COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria. In all, 82 interviews with victims of police violence were conducted, and a thematic analysis of the narratives was carried out. Findings indicate negative perceptions of police legitimacy to intervene in public health crises. In building better community relations that will engender public compliance with police directives, the police authority is advised to purge itself of its militarized system, with officers undergoing procedural justice training and imbibing its principles.

Kibera is the largest informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, and Africa’s largest urban informal settlement. It is a community plagued by poverty and unemployment. In response to the social disorganization common to informal settlements, criminal activity is rampant, particularly in assault and sexual violence cases. Patriarchal beliefs fuel power imbalances which consequently perpetuate violence. Kenyan societies tend to be traditionally patriarchal and characterized by male privilege and female subservience. This article explores the narrative accounts of female victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) to overcome patriarchy in Kibera, Kenya. Through a qualitative inquiry, 32 female victims of IPV were interviewed, and the data obtained were thematically analysed. The findings established that patriarchy is sustained in Kibera through control, dominance and violence. Additionally, salient partakers in advancing patriarchy are family structures and authorities. Moreover, strategies to dismantle patriarchy and IPV are proposed through these narrative accounts.

The relationship between terrorism and criminology illustrates the global feature of crime. Terrorism is presently at the top of the fields of interest of global criminology. However, the issue of victims of terrorism has been neglected in its research agenda. This article seeks to redefine global criminology and victimology by incorporating that issue into their fields of interest. It attempts to answer key questions like: What is the typical model for protecting the victims of terrorism? How could a more operative and effective system be created for that purpose? The European and the United Nations systems are two models that provide international experiences, developments and efforts. Since they generally form a soft law-based system, the author concludes that a protection-oriented system for victims of terrorism will be more operative and effective when it is transformed into one based on hard law.

In the recent past, the #MeToo movement has shaken India. A docket of high-flying names, from politicians to celebrities and journalists, have come under scrutiny for alleged sexual abuse of women. Flagged by a Bollywood actress, the #MeToo campaign in India ignited feminists, academicians, and policymakers to re-examine women’s continued abuse in all sections of society. Despite a stringent legal regime enforced after the Nirbhaya tragedy, the abuse of women continues unabated. Feminists opine that violence against women remains an ongoing concern that is heightened in the face of a waning criminal justice system that fails to address their plight. Lack of confidence in the system discourages women from approaching the authorities, something palpable in #MeToo allegations, where women preferred to remain silent in the face of inevitable backlash from society, lack of support and cooperation from police and prosecution and finally, courts, where the victim is positioned as the accused to respond to questions of how and why? This article examines the #MeToo movement against the rising crime graph’s backdrop and the criminal justice system’s consequent failure to respond to the same.

A correct understanding of the dynamics and mechanisms that make it possible for a woman to become a victim of intra-family violence allows the necessary measures to be taken so that she can escape from the situation of victimization. Emilio C. Viano, President of the International Society of Criminology, defines the victim of an abuse as “any subject injured or that has suffered wrongdoing on the part of others, who perceives herself to be a victim, who shares the experience with others looking for help, assistance and compensation, who is recognized as a victim and who presumably is being helped by public, private or collective agencies/structures”. Before the birth of Anti-Violence Centers it was believed that the awareness of being a victim was the necessary condition for a woman to ask for help. Experience has shown that, in reality, it is the request for help that allows her to begin a process of awareness together with the operators in the Anti-Violence Centers. This reflection has led to the creation of a theoretical model called “The Circular Model of Victimization”. The aim of the research, and which is presented here, was to verify whether the Italian Anti-Violence Centers recognize the Circular Model in the daily operational reality, and thus to ascertain whether this model can be considered a real empirical model, as well as a theoretical explanatory model. In conclusion, the revisited Circular Model of Victimization will be presented, in which it is assumed that the way out of the circuit of violence passes from a first moment of perception of victimization to arrive at a real awareness of the same.

L’objectif de cet article est de divulguer des résultats de recherches exploratoires sur le rapport entre le système judiciaire canadien et les victimes d’actes criminels dans le contexte de la détermination de la peine. De manière plus précise, l’auteur s’intéresse au processus de mise en forme des attentes des victimes qui opère à ce stade des procédures judiciaires. Pour observer ces mises en forme, l’auteur s’appuie sur des décisions judiciaires qui ont été rendues par les tribunaux canadiens. À partir de son corpus empirique, l’auteur décrit comment certaines attentes victimaires sont plus audibles que d’autres et comment leur intégration dans le processus de détermination de la peine varie en fonction du type d’attente et des circonstances à l’intérieur desquelles elles émergent.

In determining “the scope and extent of any damage, loss and injury to, or in respect of, victims” under article 75(1) of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) Statute, the ICC will progressively lay the foundation of reparations in international criminal justice. In the process of establishing the typology of harms sustained by natural and—under some qualifications—legal persons, inter-state claims practice may prove to be of assistance to the judges in light of the particular circumstances of each case. In addition, such an exercise illuminates how the doctrinal methods adopted in public international law scholarship categorize and describe the harms that have given rise to reparation claims during both war and peacetime.

Transitional justice seeks to address legacies of violence around political transition from authoritarianism and armed conflict. It does so in ways driven by a global discourse that is prescriptive and often remote from the contexts in which it is articulated and the populations it claims to serve. Transitional justice is also embedded in teleological liberal approaches to transition, with a perceived endpoint of liberal democracy. Critical approaches to transitional justice have used qualitative methodologies to understand the agendas of those—notably victims of violence—that transitional justice foregrounds, and to demonstrate that transitional justice mechanisms often serve elite agendas, while minimizing the agency of socially excluded populations. An alternative, minimally explored route to victim engagement with such processes has been the mobilization of victims and victim organizations, an emancipatory approach that seeks to provide a space for victims to engage in transitional justice debates on their own terms. Here, a research engagement with a victims’ organization through a Participatory Action Research modality is described in which researchers support victim engagement in peer research to catalyze a social movement of victims in post-conflict Nepal.