Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT: Victims of crime have historically suffered from obscurity: relegated to serving the criminal justice system rather than having that system serve their needs. This started to change on the island of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and continued apace under the aegis of the EU. Following the UK's exit from the EU (Brexit), new opportunities and challenges have emerged in this field. This paper, part of the ARINS project, charts the emergence of victims of crime as a key focus of the criminal justice systems on the island of Ireland, critically explores the protections afforded to them within these systems, and outlines some emerging issues following Brexit. It thus explores a comparatively under-discussed area in this context.

Fernando Téson argues: "Human beings have claims against their own states and governments that the international community cannot merely ignore."1 Claims which are founded on rights and their protection have become the foundation for a radical new formulation of the concept of sovereignty, as contained in the Responsibility to Protect Report of 2001. This new concept of sovereignty also lays down a new threshold for when to intervene, in order to protect civilian populations from, inter alia, brutal oppression and mass murder. However, is this new threshold sufficient to guarantee effective intervention? Can this new norm of responsibility be grounded in the different sovereign polities around the world? In this article, I attempt to examine the ideological matrix or discourse in which this new norm was founded, and explore its shortcomings when applied to different conceptualisations of sovereign polity. Further, I shall attempt to argue for a more inclusive threshold, one which can be applied more effectively to different situations and different polities which require intervention efforts.