New court, new justice?: the evolution of ‘justice for victims’ at domestic courts and at the international criminal court

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first international criminal justice institution that explicitly promises to deliver justice for victims by providing for the rights of victims to participation and reparation in criminal proceedings. More than a decade after its establishment, the time is right to consider how this new idea of justice for victims has developed at the ICC. While analysis of the ICC’s framework has benefited from international law and other academic disciplines, such as international relations and politics, there has been too little attention paid to international criminal justice by mainstream criminologists and victimologists. To fill this gap, this article will systematically reflect on the similarities and differences in the evolution of the idea of justice for victims at domestic criminal courts and the ICC from a criminological and victimological perspective. Overall, the comparison suggests that while the concept of justice for victims has been mainly understood in terms of the benefits and problems of incorporating victims’ rights into criminal law procedure in the domestic context, at the ICC, it has led to broader contestations and redefinitions of the very meaning of justice. These contestations on justice have to be understood in the institutional context of a still young and sui generis court that is unsure of the kind of justice it can and should deliver.