The conceptualisation of ‘procedural justice’ for victims and defendants: Different strokes for similar folks?

While legal notions of procedural justice for defendants are predominantly perceived in the context of human rights (Article (Art.) 6 ECHR) and have a more ‘instrumental’ aim (guaranteeing a fair outcome of criminal proceedings by respecting fair trial rights), procedural rights for victims are typically developed with an eye on participation and prevention of secondary victimisation, and they have a more ‘relational’ purpose of meeting victims’ needs to be heard, acknowledged and respected. These different perspectives on procedural justice have resulted in the creation of different types of rights. In this paper, (the rationale of) several regional victim and defendant rights instruments are compared with four ‘principles’ stemming from the social–psychological theory of procedural justice. This theory relates to the question of whether participants perceive procedures as fair, and ideally all four principles are adequately represented in the legal frameworks pertaining to victims and defendants. The comparison, however, reveals that fair trial rights for defendants pay insufficient attention to the ‘respect’ principle, while victim rights frameworks are underserving the dimensions of ‘voice’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘case processing time’. Concrete examples are provided of where defendants could potentially benefit from ‘archetypical’ victim rights and vice versa to address this lacuna.