Criminal Policy and its Victim-Oriented Development

It should be axiomatic in the twenty-first century that “one of the tasks of the Criminal code is to protect the rights and interests of the victim of crime” (Baulin Reference Baulin2020). The evolution of criminal law is a complex endeavour, necessitating a delicate balance between its established tenets and the ever-shifting dynamics of public and social relations. This discord challenges traditional mechanisms of social control, implicating various stakeholders, including the state, perpetrators, victims and civil society, each with divergent perspectives on criminal law. Indeed, the concept of criminal law varies significantly across different segments of society, encompassing citizens, the media, social groups and law enforcement authorities. The autonomous concepts of criminal law, punishment and crime exist also in European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and European Court of Justice (ECJ) practice.Footnote ¹

Twenty-four years ago, the first monograph on victimology (Tuliakov Reference Tuliakov2000) was published in Ukraine. Since then, significant changes have occurred. New research on the interaction between the offender and the victim has emerged, and the concept of the safety index has become central in assessing the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies. Victimological ideas have also permeated into traditionally conservative areas of public law interpretation. Notably, modern commentaries on the Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine now often begin with an analysis of the victim’s characteristics rather than a Marxist-focused description of the public danger of the offence.

The world is changing, and so are law and social theories. Concepts like protectionism and the deification of state structures are giving way to social partnership and the primacy of human rights. Modernity and structuralism are being replaced by postmodernism and metamodernism. The dialectic of the general, the particular and the individual is transitioning to the metaphysics of part and whole.

Despite the pluralism of ideas and concepts, the fundamental relationship between the ideology of natural criminal law, based on the primacy of human and citizen rights, and the ideology of positive criminal law, built on the state’s right to punish for violations of social conditions, remains unchanged. However, the world today is not what it once was. The right to hope and happiness aligns much more closely with the ideals of civil society than with the obligation to obey disciplinary norms. Rebellions, revolutions, acts of civil disobedience, occupation of buildings, mass protests, and the communicative dissonance in social media correspond to thousands of complaints to the ECtHR about the total victimization of citizens by individual states and governments.

At the same time, reverse processes exist, where the sprouts of civil society, freedom and democracy mimic the struggle for civil rights, and the abuse of the law becomes the norm, while legality is merely a façade for expediency. The substitution of meanings and double standards has given rise to the concept of post-truth in the relationship between citizen and state, where words and actions correspond not to the essence of phenomena but to manipulation.

Today, we live in a world that creates images, not essences, in a state where armed conflicts are classified as acts of terror, and prisoner exchanges occur in a quasi-legal field. On certain territories, quasi-criminal laws are in force, but real victims are being harmed. The concept of the primacy of rights is being replaced by the concept of equality, where the victim and the offender, the state and third parties (civil society) are mutually responsible for the occurrence of criminal offences.

However, even now, neophytes are trying to discover a unipolar world, which, in principle, cannot exist. The substitution of concepts and the hyperbole of “the right to …” lead to distortions and inefficiencies in the interaction between the state and the citizen, creating a twilight zone of quasi-right and non-right. Here, any fascination with the foundations of monotheism or the deification of law is as dangerous as the universalism of the system of human rights protection and security. The right to happiness turns out to be more important than the right to fair treatment, though no phase of modern society can provide true justice and equality, especially in the realm of crime control and criminality.

There is, however, one clarification to be made. The optimal regime may have been achieved, in part, thanks to victimological knowledge. Ideal legislation can exist in a society far from ideal, but what prospects does it offer for human happiness? This is the question we attempt to address in this work, where the classical victimological approach, described 24 years ago, is supplemented with issues of the methodology of lawmaking in criminal law.

The history of human development shows that measures to combat crime are often not associated with a well-balanced approach to its analysis. National culture, public pressure, and administrative and political processes are just a few of the factors influencing anti-crime campaigns. The grand scale and global nature of the tasks inspire immediate solutions. However, it hardly needs proving that not every global crime prevention programme, or rather, none of them, is capable of fulfilling the objectives set before it.

Crime is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon derived from the most important social characteristics of a society. In this regard, the success of crime control policies depends on many positive results achieved in smaller areas. At the same time, the effectiveness of law depends on its ability to achieve the goals of legal regulation, aimed at ensuring security and protecting the subjects of relevant legal relations. World, regional and national features of the implementation of protective and preventive legal relations lead to an inevitable differentiation in the assessment of the effectiveness of measures depending on the characteristics of the subjects, objects and needs of other participants in criminal law relations (victims, third parties, social groups, states, and international and transnational organizations).

Thus, the effectiveness of criminal law impact varies according to the complex factors and relationships involved and cannot be reduced solely to the notion of the effectiveness of criminal law as a whole within a state.

This effectiveness is closely related to the assessment of criminal law regulation, the criminal–political environment, and the peculiarities of legal realization and legal understanding at multiple levels of social interaction.

This corresponds with the feelings of security experienced by the subjects of criminal legal relations. Years of experience demonstrate that attempts at legal control over crime are often globally uniform and largely unsuccessful. Even successful models (such as those of the USA, Canada and Japan, which had shown a standard trend of declining crime rates) expressed relative ineffectiveness by the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century when applied to specific subcultures and the unique dynamics between civil society and law enforcement. Comparing modern Chicago gangs with Ukrainian hybrid armed formations and riots before the Russian invasion reveals differences only in the degree of cohesion within the protest movements, determined not so much by conformity, contagion and imitation, but rather by individual reflections on the significance of civil rights for each individual and their sense of protection.

Criminal law intervention today is an attempt to overcome the bifurcation shift toward the institutionalization of society, in favour of the managed distribution of resources within modern liberal democratic models.

The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals focus on the protection of human rights and freedoms, combatting inequality and discrimination, and maintaining peace and security both within and between states. However, given the active processes of societal self-organization, the non-linear nature of relationships between individuals in the information space, and the hybrid nature of legal intervention in a transnational context, these objectives are methodologically flawed.

The self-organization of the social organism, in opposition to policies ostensibly oriented toward human welfare, can play a cruel joke on its architects. The institution of law, as a sub-institutional formation of the state, demonstrates its high inefficiency in Ukraine, manifested in the non-enforcement of laws and judicial arbitrariness, which has already become a widespread and surprising practice. This phenomenon underscores that organizationally fixed institutional relationships become non-functional in the absence of resonance with self-organized legal norms. The real question is which of these have greater legitimacy.

Self-organized, parallel legal relationships eventually dominate and even subjugate those who should have resisted them, including public officials, law enforcement and government representatives. When organizational and self-organized components of legal relations coincide, the state’s efforts to maintain law and order are minimized, as self-organization performs this function using cultural and psychological mechanisms that place the point of social control within the individual’s internal space.

The central problem of modern global governance is that the innovations and creativity of the information society create a new environment where time and space are not fragmented by the legal families and borders of states but are subjected to new, relatively unexplored “waves” of energy impacts, media movements, capital flows and migration. These are connected (selectively but universally) by information memes that organize and direct this movement. However, everything is broken by the wars, international conflicts and human rights abuses.

The states themselves, and the world as a whole, find themselves powerless to understand the inevitability of the primacy of individual evaluations of good and evil, cultivated by informational networks, and the retribution for actions, thoughts and behaviours of social subjects, which increasingly focus on their own (group) interpretations of good and evil rather than on norms carefully nurtured over centuries.

In this context, collective selfishness, hedonism and anomie, generated by new communicative connections, are becoming the norm of the modern world order. The concept of individual security is overtaking that of social security, and the forces of self-organization, in pursuit of expediency, are destroying the normative structure of the world order.

This phenomenon is especially evident during periods of social revolutions and reforms. The entropy of law, the blending of meanings, and the diversification of legal conflicts and rules of human coexistence have become the norm. The concept of law recedes into the background, while the idea of political expediency and communication-driven meaning comes to the forefront.

We have become accustomed to the notion that the stability of structures and management systems generates controllability within systemic processes of social control.

However, the world is governed by chaos – albeit a highly organized chaos. Modern perceptions of good and evil, models of what is deemed good and just, are losing their original essence and dissolving in the virtuality of evaluations and the multipolarity of approaches. Augmented realities of thought, spirit and action thrive against the backdrop of the twilight of regulation concerning civil rights and freedoms, as centuries-old postulates and values of liberty, equality and fraternity are undermined from within by the spontaneously expanding interpretations of the fundamental principles of individual, societal and state development, in favour of ensuring individual security.

The concept of the primacy of personal security and personal rights over social security has played a cruel trick on the world: Generation Z has been replaced by reflexive, self-organized masses in the virtual space, for whom capturing a Pokémon means creating new sensations and images of the world; killing a police officer means standing up for centuries-suppressed racial interests; creating a stateless society in the landscape of fundamentalist beliefs means securing a happy future for generations to come.

Modern states, law and the concept of world order are becoming increasingly virtual, with their functions often being supplanted by processes of hybrid self-organization grounded in the reflexivity of network-based attractors. The substitute for state sovereignty is now mobile groups whose extraterritorial powers are dictated by the expediency reflexively defined by social networks or the authority of the network structures themselves (ranging from the EU and transnational corporations to civic networks and terrorist organizations).

Abuse of power for personal gain, trolling on social media, misuse of freedom of speech to identify enemies through memes, and the blending of concepts within models of political, administrative and criminal responsibility are not just realities of the era but standard forms of social life today. The false principle of equality, the diversification of interpretations of fundamental rights, religious evaluations and moral values, the autonomy of will, and the dissolution of responsibility in network behaviours – all these phenomena, including the use of “hidden advertising” in political and legal management, characterize not only society but also the goal-oriented activities of administrative structures. For these structures, the hybrid and amorphous legal form serves as a field for realizing new possibilities.

The above points suggest the need to study the effectiveness of criminal law intervention in modern conditions from the perspective of:

• Reflexivity and interaction between the concepts of morality and wrongdoing within normative and self-organized legal systems;

• Equality of participants in primary and secondary criminal law relations, considering the ideology, principles and language of law, as well as the social (individual/network) support and approval of legal actors’ rights;

• A new universal language paradigm in criminal law, based on moral support and uniform perceptions of evil, retribution, compensation and restitution for victims of crime.

The modern global community is increasingly guided by expediency and individual welfare rather than by the social interests generated by ideologists. The effectiveness of criminal law intervention is not associated with elements of criminal policy but with the efficiency of alternative approaches to justice distribution, generated by networks and informational interactions. Thus, today’s criminal law regime is characterized by hybrid legality and illegality, criminally tinged abuses of the law (which may be assessed and qualified as criminal offences or borderline situations, depending on the situation’s status and the political attitudes of law enforcement agencies). On the individual, societal and social levels, these processes manifest differently in terms of their visibility, but their impact is evident.

The most important aspect is that public law institutions in this hybrid setting do not fully or predictably influence social processes due to the fictitious nature of meanings, double standards and the breakdown of communicative contacts. The diversification of norms and ideas about actions and responsibility leads to the fragmentation of normative characteristics and ideas about behaviour and accountability.

The definition of crime and its punishment remains the prerogative of the state in the positivist understanding of law. However, transitioning to other levels of legal understanding opens new planes for analysis.

In criminal law, due to the dominance of hidden communicative ideas (e.g. state security v. personal security), we face problems of the dysfunctionality of legal meanings and the narrowing of the legal landscape. The inflation of the current model of fundamental human rights, rooted in the dysfunctionality of its protection, is growing, while the concept of criminal offence is becoming increasingly blurred. This leads to the mixing of certain elements in the institution of the hyperbolization of one phenomenon and the dominance of other forms, ultimately resulting in the violation of the homeostasis of information and energy in a world moving from stability toward entropy. The current surge in crime, cruelty, callousness, immorality and deviations is merely a reaction to the parallel coexistence of total abuses of the law and the hybridization of legal and mechanical governance mechanisms at political, social and individual levels.

Understanding the essence of these processes opens up new prospects for further criminal law research and for the development of programmes that seek to understand both established and new elements of criminological and criminal law knowledge.

Among the programmes that have proven effective in limiting crime is the creation of a system of fair and humane treatment of crime victims and teaching potential crime victims basic strategies for responding to conflict situations. This approach underscores the fact that ensuring public safety is one of the primary responsibilities of the state. The state maintains a massive criminal justice apparatus at taxpayer expense, and if it fails to protect its citizens from criminal assaults, it should bear responsibility for the damage caused. This reflects the real expectations of the population, which is interested in effective protection of its constitutional rights and freedoms.

Improving crime victims’ access to the criminal justice system and ensuring fair and humane treatment of them can help reduce citizens’ fear of crime, foster their cooperation with political authorities, and enhance the democratic foundations of governance, ultimately reducing crime rates.

The relevance of this research is confirmed by the necessity to develop victimological research and improve the legal regulation of victims’ rights in Ukraine’s criminal justice system.

The identified problem is generally addressed in domestic science within the framework of criminal victimology, which is regarded as the study of the crime victim, a specialized criminological theory with its own subject, methods and forms of realization. It is no coincidence that, in legal sciences, “victimology” as a term is understood more narrowly. It is the study of the victim, the injured party or the one suffering from an offence, particularly from a crime. However, around the world, victimology is experiencing rapid growth as a unified science on victims of socially dangerous phenomena, becoming a subfield of sociology.

Despite the considerable number of high-quality studies produced by the aforementioned authors (Baulin Reference Baulin2020; Tuliakov Reference Tuliakov2000), the development of victimology as a particular theory within the broader criminological framework remains incomplete. This applies to the definition of the philosophical and social foundations for a unified victimology theory, as well as the scientific problems of defining and understanding the core concepts of criminal victimology, specialized research methodologies, and the comparative analysis of victimization processes in the unique political and legal conditions of Ukraine.

Another challenge lies in the humanization of political consciousness in Ukraine, which requires the criminal justice system to pay real attention to crime victims. Unfortunately, the need to revise the fundamentals of criminology, which arose with the collapse of the official criminological ideology of the Soviet Union, did not allow Ukrainian criminologists to actively develop theoretical and practical approaches to the study of victimology. As a result, the crime victim has again been relegated to a forgotten figure in the state’s criminological policy, as well as in efforts aimed at individual crime prevention.

Thus, the task is to deepen and further develop the foundations of criminal victimology theory, building a system of scientific knowledge about crime victims to optimize social control over crime, humanize criminological policy, and bring Ukrainian national legislation in line with international legal standards on the protection of crime victims’ rights.

The relevance of research into the socio-legal foundations of victimology stems from several factors:

• The need to humanize the activities of social control over crime and improve their effectiveness;

• The need for philosophical and scientific reflection on the formation of criminal victimology as a specialized theory within the broader framework of victimology;

• The necessity of developing theoretical aspects of domestic victimology in line with the latest advancements in the sociology of deviant behaviour and global victimological theory. This includes reassessing existing knowledge and exploring new aspects of victimological crime prevention based on global crime control practices and comparative analysis of victimological legislation in developed countries;

• The theoretical substantiation of proposals for the development of Ukrainian victimological legislation;

• The need to promote practical victimological research and formulate scientifically sound recommendations for reducing victims’ vulnerability to crime.

Emilio Viano (Reference Viano1992) drew attention to the requirements of self-identification in understanding the concept of “victim”, not to mention the conscious parallel to the psychological understanding of a criminal offence in the works of Pitirim Sorokin (Reference Sorokin1912). The ECtHR in its judgment in the case of Ramadan v. France Footnote ² unanimously declared the application inadmissible. The case concerned the applicant’s conviction for disseminating information about the identity of the alleged victim of a rape for which he was on trial. The Court noted that the domestic courts had clarified the concept of “victim” for the purposes of the Press Freedom Act and confirmed that only the written permission of the person who had filed the criminal complaint and entered the proceedings as a civil party could release the applicant from criminal liability under the law, waiving the obligation of secrecy and allowing the dissemination of information about her identity. Concerning the concept of “victim”, the Court noted that X had joined the proceedings as a civil party in March 2018 during the judicial investigation initiated against the applicant, thereby positioning herself as a person who had “personally suffered damage directly caused by the crime” for the purposes of Article 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and thus as a victim of the serious criminal acts at issue in the proceedings. The Paris Court of Appeal, and subsequently the Court of Cassation, agreed that the term “victim” “necessarily applies to anyone who considers himself or herself to be such a person”. The Court therefore noted that the domestic courts had rightly considered that X should be regarded as a victim. The ECtHR also noted that the courts had taken into account the behaviour of the victim, who felt the need to discuss the events and thus disclosed information that allowed her to be identified. The Court concluded that, given the broad margin of appreciation of the respondent state, the challenged interference with the applicant’s freedom of expression was proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. Therefore, the ECtHR declared the application inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded. Aside from the balance of proportionality and publicity, it is interesting to note that the term “victim” “necessarily applies to anyone who considers himself or herself to be such a person”. At one time, in contrast to the established understanding of the concept of a victim of a criminal offence in UN soft law (the term “victims” refers to persons who have individually or collectively suffered harm, including bodily injury or moral harm, emotional distress, material damage or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights as a result of an act or omission in violation of the applicable national criminal laws of Member States, including those prohibiting the criminal abuse of power), in international criminal law, victims under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court may be individuals, organizations or institutions that have suffered direct damage to any of their property dedicated to religious, educational, artistic, scientific or charitable purposes, as well as their historical monuments, hospitals and other places and objects intended for humanitarian purposes. Thus, the development of the phenomenology of the human-centred approach in criminal law continues at the level of the Council of Europe.

Victimization and Criminal Law: Lessons of the Ukrainian War

A new era needs to clarify new emergent criminal policies as part of international and state public policy in preventing deviance and treatment of victims. The development of these emergent criminal policy concepts is based on the landscape of victims’ fair treatment through the protection of human rights.

However, there are huge contradictions in the way we could do it. Let us look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fareed Zakaria from Cable News Network (CNN) (Zakaria Reference Zakaria2023), discussing the 2022–2024 conflict, asked:

Despite these fearful notices, to Ukrainians the only way is victory: victory to protect their European choice, their Motherland, their urge for Freedom, and decolonization from the past. With approximate war casualties since 24 February 2022 until the middle of 2024 around 120,000 and an average Ukrainian family size of 2.59, at least 310,000 Ukrainian citizens have experienced the death or wounding of direct family members (Seybolt, Aronson, and Fischhoff Reference Seybolt, Aronson and Fischhoff2013). If we include more distant relatives, the number rises to millions. Almost every Ukrainian citizen has now felt the direct consequences of the war on their ordinary lives – economic, political and cultural. With every day that the war progresses, the questions as to what they are suffering for have been generated in numbers. Unfortunately, this way is accomplished with thousands of victims not in my own country Ukraine, but in our neighbourhood, beyond Ukraine. More than six million Ukrainians have become forced migrants. Their non-return will cost the economy more than $113 billion. The potential labour shortage due to the war is estimated in millions. According to experts, it could reach 4.5 million people, which is about $45 billion in lost taxes over 10 years. Failure to return forced migrants to their homeland will cost Ukraine $113 billion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) over 10 years (in 2021 prices). A probable number of Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons exceeds 24,000,000 persons since 24 February 2022 (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] 2023). Half the population of the country have become nomads.

There is no doubt that many Ukrainian refugees in Europe have experienced hardship and challenges, including discrimination and xenophobia; the level of victimization can vary greatly depending on the individual’s circumstances and the host country’s policies and attitudes towards refugees. Despite their primary victimization due to the war and their need to flee their homes, Ukrainian refugees in Europe are at great risk of falling victim to organized crime, sexual exploitation, human trafficking and illegal supply chains, as well as classic crimes such as theft, burglary and fraud, etc. (EUROPOL 2022).

While Ukrainian refugees can be targeted at different stages of their journey, EUROPOL (2022) said the highest risks concern the targeting of victims under the presence of promising transportation, free accommodation, employment or other sorts of support. These numbers of Ukrainian people, stressed from war and being victimized before and in the process of their travel, need some extra explanation (Sánchez Nicolás Reference Sánchez Nicolás2022). Approximately 3,000,000 of them are so-called pendulum migrants who came to the United Kingdom and Europe every year to work seasonally after the opening up the Schengen Area to Ukrainian citizens. Nearly 5,000,000 refugees from Ukraine registered for Temporary Protection or similar national protection schemes in Europe. Among the 11,000,000 who have returned to Ukraine, we find a huge amount of seasonal workers who have returned for three to six months to Ukraine and then will arrive again in Europe in order not to violate Temporary Protection Directive conditions, and mothers with children fleeing from the hostilities of war for a couple of spring months and then returning.

Those who are not familiar with the language and professions are staying for a couple of months in neighbouring countries that are part of the Ukrainian Crisis Response Plan (Romania, Poland, Hungary, etc.). Those who have previous arrangements or specialties are finding success in the West’s ongoing work in European neighbourhoods, formatting their cultural alliances and assimilating into European ones (Tuliakov Reference Tuliakov and Martίnez2023c, Reference Tuliakov2023d).

Furthermore, secondary victimization depends on a lack of services, the implication of different kinds of state bureaucracy, negative attitudes, fear of migrants, and hate speech. There are some cases when Ukrainian citizens fled for material help to EU countries, renting out their estates to internally displaced Ukrainian persons who came from the east, primarily influenced by armed aggression, and then returned to Ukraine, living as renters and receiving EU help. We also know that some borderline ethnic groups with double passports, living legally in one country, moved to another asking for material help from neighbouring governments and social services as Ukrainian refugees. Thus, in some neighbouring EU countries the system of an obligatory periodical registration of Ukrainian migrants who received material help from the state was created.

There is a gap, influenced by victims’ marginalization from one side, and states’ interests to use migrants’ resources. In a country with a high level of migration, one of the leading Ukrainian economists in a local media interview notes:

The European Central Bank expects that the participation rate of Ukrainian refugees of working age in the labour force of the Eurozone countries will be between 25% and 55% in the medium term. Estimates of the potential growth of the labour force in the EU are 0.2–0.8%, or 0.3–1.3 million people (Tucha et al. Reference Tucha, Spivak, Bondarenko and Pogarska2022).

In any case, victims of war in Ukraine are ready to spend huge sums of money in the European neighbourhood. After the outbreak of war, Ukrainians transferred abroad seven times more money from their bank accounts than in peacetime. Surely, migration has its positive economic background. However, migrants and internally displaced persons must deal with huge psychological trauma. Stress, fear, anger, hate, anxiety, nostalgia and frustration are everyday companions of Ukrainian forced migrants. Before the full-scale war, 4% of Ukrainian people had nightmares all the time; now it is a third of the population. Surely people’s minds are flexible, but under constant stress there is a tremendous amount of negative impact.

Therefore, the primary and secondary victimization of victims of aggression against Ukraine is to be considered as direct victimization of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the limitation of the rights to compensate and redress in national criminal and civil law as well as in international humanitarian law.

Due to UN soft law and international humanitarian law there exist different forms of reparation: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition.Footnote ³ The right to redress, rehabilitation and compensation comes close to violations of Articles 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8 of the Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Court of Human Rights 2021).

More than 300 billion US dollars that belong to the Russian Federation and their oligarchs have been frozen. However, usage of this money to compensate and repair Ukrainian victims and their damaged economy is restricted, because compensation needs confiscation. A complex holistic approach based on mutual recognition of all parties’ rights and obligations should give a positive effect in combatting war crime and constructing new law as the result of new security paradigms based on the internationalization of domestic laws. The shift towards criminalizing non-obeying of sanctions at the EU level is a strict argument for the above-named proposal (European Commission 2022).

Tertiary victimization in Ukrainian society is influencing not only families of victims, or even witnesses of Russian terror, but is also connected with the promotion of Russian-oriented ideology and narratives, and certain treatment of victims. Since the Odesa Massacre in 2014, hate and fear, misuse of narratives of Nazi ideology and the promotion of immortal stereotypes of the international Slavonic role in a bipolar world leads to “evil empire thinking”. While the potential diffuse victims may not be the intended victims or primary target, they have still been victimized because of the crimes and violations of international law committed in contradiction of Articles 8–13 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hate crimes and narratives of dehumanization through the idea of the denazification of Ukrainians) (European Court of Human Rights 2021).

Finally, the EU initial intelligence analysis of different criminal threats has identified crime patterns in several areas including human trafficking, online fraud, cybercrime and firearms trafficking. Thus, according to some experts’ opinion, the evolution of the situation in Ukraine may potentially lead to an increase in criminal activities (and primary, secondary and tertiary victimization) in all 10 European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT) priority crime areas (European Council 2021).

To resist this trend, it is important to use human rights law as the basis for the development of criminal law and the scientific foundations of criminalization, considering victimological knowledge. The security of the state depends on the vector of development, ideology of victimizing society (victim-lamb, victim-hero), absolutization of human rights and harmonious (proportional and legal) responsibility for their violation. Therefore, the security of the individual cannot be secondary to the security of society or the state.

Victim-Oriented Policy and Criminal Law

In the context of the approximation of EU acquis and Council of Europe norms to Ukrainian criminal legislation, it becomes evident that contemporary criminal law serves as a fundamental tool for safeguarding human rights. This theoretical framework aligns with Recommendation CM/Rec(2023)2 of the Committee of Ministers of the European Council, which underscores the paramount importance of protecting individual human rights:

This statement pertains to the development of criminal law theory, specifically in the context of victim rights and the recognition of crime as a violation of both societal norms and individual rights. Let us break down the key points and elaborate on their implications within criminal law theory.

Pragmatical Development of Holistic Methodology

Approaching criminal law from a victimological perspective offers multifaceted insights. Pragmatically, it entails an exploration of the role of victims in criminal liability and their integration into the Special Part of criminal legislation. Criminal law, transitioning from its historical repressive functions to contemporary preventive principles within democratic states, plays an instrumental role in fostering social justice and curbing crime. This transition has led to an intricate regulation of the victim’s physical and social characteristics, behaviour, status and the harm inflicted upon them, significantly influencing crime qualification and the offender’s culpability.

In navigating these regulatory provisions, it becomes imperative to discern how victimization knowledge applies to criminal law relations and the broader process of criminalization. This encompasses various issues, including victimization in criminalization, the role of victims in criminal law, their impact on the doctrine of crime, the doctrine of punishment, and the classification of criminal offences.

Victimology affords a unique lens through which to scrutinize the alignment between formal legal norms and public perceptions of crime. The examination of these correlations facilitates an assessment of the efficacy of criminal law prohibitions and the identification of measures to promote prosocial victim engagement in crime control (Tuliakov Reference Tuliakov, Davulis and Gasparėnienė2023b).

Expanding the application of passive citizenship principles within the ambit of criminal law could hold the potential to enhance justice. This expansion entails extending jurisdiction to encompass crimes committed by foreign citizens against the rights and freedoms of Ukrainian citizens or the interests of Ukraine abroad. Enacting real citizenship principles for crimes committed outside Ukraine against Ukrainian citizens could further fortify the cause of social justice.

Prioritizing the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms necessitates revisiting select aspects of modern criminal law theory, including the recognition of specific individuals, legal entities and social groups as objects of crime. The amplification of victim protection within criminal law relations, with a concentrated focus on compensation and restitution, constitutes an intrinsic and ongoing process in alignment with societal expectations (Tuliakov Reference Tuliakov2023e, Reference Tuliakov2023f).

The next step should be the implementation of the bilateral Ljubljana–the Hague Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance and Extradition (MLA).Footnote ⁴ This document as a milestone step in mutual legal assistance and prosecution of international crimes after the Rome Statute represents a significant development in the realm of international legal assistance and extradition, addressing crucial gaps in this field. The Convention underscores a victim-centric perspective within international criminal law while upholding the principles of equitable justice for those accused of criminal wrongdoing. Central to its mandate is the elucidation of procedural intricacies, the delineation of substantive content, and the delimitation of the scope of legal assistance. Furthermore, the Convention categorically prohibits the provision of amnesty in cases involving international crimes. Due to conventional understanding and rules “victims” means natural persons who have suffered harm because of the commission of any crime to which this Convention applies. Also, according to Article 81 of the Convention, “victims” may include organizations or institutions that have sustained direct harm to any of their property which is dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or their historic monuments, hospitals, and other places and objects for humanitarian purposes. According to Article 82, each State Party shall take appropriate measures within its means to provide effective protection from potential retaliation or intimidation, including ill-treatment, to victims and witnesses and, as appropriate, their relatives or representatives, experts as well as any other persons participating in or cooperating with any investigation, prosecution, or other proceedings within the scope of this Convention. In Article 83 it is stated that each State Party shall, subject to its domestic law, ensure that the victims of a crime to which the State Party applies this Convention have the right to reparation for harm consisting of but not limited to, as appropriate, restitution, compensation or rehabilitation insofar as either: the crime has been committed in any territory under the jurisdiction of that State Party, or that State Party is exercising its jurisdiction over the crime. Each State Party shall, subject to its domestic law, establish procedures, as appropriate, to permit victims to participate in and enable views and concerns of victims to be presented and considered at appropriate stages of criminal proceedings against alleged offenders in a manner not prejudicial to the rights of the defendant. Each State Party shall, to the extent provided for in its domestic law and if so requested, give effect to a judgment or order in criminal proceedings, issued by the domestic law of the requesting State Party, to provide restitution, compensation or rehabilitation to victims of crimes to which they apply this Convention.Footnote ⁵

Of note is the Convention’s commitment to streamlining various aspects of asset management. It introduces simplifications in the processes associated with the freezing, seizure, confiscation and conversion of assets. Additionally, the Convention contains explicit provisions concerning the disposal of such assets, with a specific emphasis on the interests of victims of international crimes. It also addresses identifying and tracing property or proceeds linked to criminal activities. Importantly, the treaty acts as a consolidating force, transforming established practices in asset management into a comprehensive legal framework. This framework fills a void that has persisted for an extended period, enabling individual states and associations to circumvent asset confiscation based on its prior absence.

Mostly it will give a new theoretical landscape to criminalize unified crimes against humanity and war crimes in national substantial criminal legislation.