Carolyn Hoyle

The Criminal cases review commission reviews possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland when applicants have exhausted other avenues of appeal, with a view to referring unsafe convictions back to the appeal court. This article considers the CCRC's handling of applications from refugees and asylum seekers who claim to have been wrongfully convicted of entering the UK illegally. These cases commonly relate to people who could not obtain travel documents lawfully and were erroneously advised by defence lawyers that they should plead guilty. The article 1st examines the sources of these wrongful convictions by reviewing CCRC referrals to the appeal court. It then reviews the CCRC's wider engagement with other criminal justice agencies in an effort to prevent further wrongful convictions of refugees and asylum seekers. The failing of the criminal justice agencies to properly protect refugees and asylum seekers reflects a wider anxiety about the negative effects of immigration, and the societal appetite to use punitive measures to control immigration. The article concludes by arguing that the CCRC's campaign was effective, and demonstrates the importance of interagency communication in preventing miscarriages of justice.

The London Borough of Croydon, in the south of England, established, in December 2005, a Family Justice Centre (FJC) to respond in a flexible way to meet the varied needs of those abused in intimate relationships. The FJC brings together some 33 agencies under one roof. This article draws on a small, grounded pilot study of the Croydon FJC – the first study of a FJC in the UK  to consider if the co-location and cooperation of services to victims of domestic abuse has the potential to empower victims to make informed choices about their futures.

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.