Guaranteeing the rights of crime victims has become a core element of achieving justice within the criminal justice system, surpassing the mere goals of remedy and recovery for victims. Such protection holds a dual significance: on a micro-level, it s...
Guaranteeing the rights of crime victims has become a core element of achieving justice within the criminal justice system, surpassing the mere goals of remedy and recovery for victims. Such protection holds a dual significance: on a micro-level, it safeguards the interests of individual victims, while on a macro-level, it ensures the fairness and legitimacy of criminal proceedings and strengthens the rule of law across society. This shift reflects a growing recognition that crime victims’ rights must be considered an essential component of criminal proceedings.
Notably, enabling victims to actively participate as substantive rights holders in criminal procedures can prevent secondary victimization and enhance public trust in the justice system. In the past, crime victims were often relegated to being mere tools for proving crimes or passive recipients of protection. However, recent legislative trends, both internationally and domestically, have increasingly recognized crime victims as independent subjects of rights and are evolving to ensure their substantive participation.
Although South Korea has adopted various victim protection measures in line with global trends, significant room for improvement remains. The current system not only falls short of meeting the practical needs of crime victims but also fails to align with the expectations of the general public. While the Constitution explicitly mandates the protection of crime victims, the system remains heavily skewed toward safeguarding the rights of suspects and defendants, leaving the rights of victims relatively marginalized. Despite ongoing efforts by the government and related institutions, the current victim protection and support framework is insufficient to address fundamental challenges, necessitating a comprehensive review of the system.
A fundamental solution lies in shifting the judicial paradigm from treating victims as mere witnesses to recognizing them as substantive litigants with rights within criminal proceedings. However, an abrupt paradigm shift in the criminal justice system could lead to legal confusion; therefore, a gradual approach that minimizes the impact on the existing legal framework while ensuring the substantive protection of victims’ rights is advisable.
Among such gradual measures, prioritizing victims' rights to information deserves special attention. In recent years, crime victims have expressed an increasing desire to understand the progress of their cases and actively participate in criminal proceedings. At the same time, the digital transformation era has heightened concerns about the risks of personal information breaches and misuse. Against this backdrop, this study aims to analyze the current state of guaranteeing crime victims’ rights to information in criminal proceedings and explore avenues for improvement.
Using a literature review methodology, this study systematically analyzed the meaning and scope of crime victims' rights to information. The study focuses on direct crime victims and limits the scope of analysis to criminal proceedings conducted by the police, prosecutors, and courts during investigation and trial stages.
The findings reveal that crime victims' rights to information can be categorized into two dimensions: the passive right to information protection and the active right to access information. In the passive dimension, systems are in place to protect personal details, prevent information leaks, and mitigate secondary victimization. However, shortcomings in legal foundations and effectiveness were identified. In the active dimension, while victims' rights to information on investigation progress, indictment decisions, trial schedules, and verdicts are partially guaranteed, their scope remains limited.
To address these issues, the study conducted a comparative legal analysis of relevant systems in Germany, Japan, and the United States and proposed improvements applicable to South Korea. Key recommendations include codifying the omission of personal details and the operation of identity management cards in the Criminal Procedure Act, clearly distinguishing responsibilities for managing identity cards, improving inconsistent pseudonym statement practices, and exploring new identity creation methods. Further, ensuring consistency with the Personal Information Protection Act, systematizing notification systems, expanding access to case records, and establishing clear personal information protection standards in the process of viewing or copying litigation materials were proposed.
In particular, for improving notification systems, the study recommends revising the content, format, and procedures of victim rights guides, restructuring notification systems across investigative, prosecutorial, and trial stages, providing remedies for omissions in notifications, and ensuring the right to refuse the provision of information. Additionally, the study suggests strengthening victims' rights to information acquisition through the legalization of case record access and ensuring conditional access with usage restrictions.
This study aims to establish an institutional framework that allows crime victims to be respected as autonomous rights holders in criminal proceedings by substantively guaranteeing their rights to information. It is anticipated that these efforts will enhance the fairness and legitimacy of criminal justice processes and contribute to the balanced development of a system that effectively protects victims' rights.
Strengthening crime victims’ rights to information plays a vital role in establishing their autonomous status within criminal proceedings and promoting the fairness and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Through the analyses and proposals presented in this study, the criminal justice system can move toward a more balanced approach to protecting the rights of both offenders and victims.