Debating on the rights of crime victims: A legisprudential examination of the parliamentary deliberation on the Spanish Victim Protection Act

• Autores: Jorge Gracia Ibáñez
• Localización: Debating laws: studies on parliamentary justification of legislation / Angel Daniel Oliver Lalana (ed. lit.), 2024, ISBN 9783031467264, págs. 115-145
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This paper pursues a legisprudential analysis of the justificatory value and the rationality of the arguments used in the parliamentary process that led to the approval of the Crime Victim Protection Act (Law 4/2015). This legislative scenario proves interesting, on the one hand, because the recognition of the rights of victims seems at first glance to be a non-controversial topic; on the other hand, because the Spanish legislature had to implement a European framework directive that limited its leeway to regulate the underlying issues. After a brief victimological contextualisation of what has been labelled ‘the return of the victim’ to criminal policies (with a focus on the Spanish case), we analyse the rationality of the arguments used during deliberations and discuss to what extent these legislative debates were actually as conciliatory and consensus-oriented as some MPs rhetorically claimed in their parliamentary speeches. In this regard, special attention is paid to extremely contentious provisions such as Article 13, which regulates the participation of victims in the execution of criminal sentences, as well as to those parliamentary arguments that reveal political or ideological conflicts and opposing policy models in the field of crime victim protection.