Anti-Impunity: Do Human Rights Give the Victim a Right to Punishment?

The project examines the human rights guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and the fundamental rights of the German Grundgesetz as shaped by the respective case law to determine the extent to which they grant victims of crime subjective rights to punishment of the offender. The different justification models will be compared in terms of their motivation and scope in order to outline the extent and form of subjective legal claims of crime victims. Additionally, the project is devoted to the question of the extent to which accommodating tendencies can be observed in the theory of punishment that underpin such a subjective right of the victim to punishment. Building on this, an attempt will be made to outline a justification of punishment based on subjective rights that the state merely mediates through its sovereign powers. The potential of such considerations for the rights of the victim is then confronted with political and practical legal limits, as illustrated by the example of the International Criminal Court.