Contributing to the literature on comparative criminal procedure and Latin American law this
book examines the effects of adversarial criminal justice reforms on victim's rights by
specifically analyzing the Colombian criminal justice reform of the early 2000s. This research
focuses on the production interpretation and implementation of rules and institutions by
exploring how different actors have employed the concept of victims and victims' rights to
promote their agendas in the context of criminal justice reforms. It also analyzes how the
goals of these agendas have interplayed in practice. By the early 2000s it seemed that the
Colombian criminal justice system was headed towards a process characterized by broader victim
participation primarily because of the doctrine of the Constitutional Court on victims'
rights. But in 2002 the Colombian Attorney General promoted a more adversarial criminal
justice reform. This book argues that this reform represented a sudden and unpredicted reversal
of the Constitutional Court's doctrine on victim participation even though one of the central
justifications for the reform was the need to satisfy human rights standards and adhere to the
jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on victims' rights. In the criminal justice reform of
the early 2000s and its subsequent modifications the promotion of a dichotomous interpretation
of the adversarial model-which conceived the criminal process as a competition between
prosecution and defense-served to limit victim participation. This study examines how
conceptions of victims' rights emerged out of the struggles between different and at times
competing agendas. In the Colombian process of reform victims' rights have been invoked both
as a justification for criminal sanctions and as an explanation for crime prevention and
restorative justice. After assessing quantitative and qualitative data this book concludes
that punitive approaches to victims' rights have prevailed over restorative justice
perspectives. Furthermore it argues that punitiveness in the criminal justice system has not
resulted in more protection for victims. Ultimately this research reveals that the adversarial
criminal justice reform of the early 2000s has not substantially improved the protection of
victims' rights in Colombia.
