Page 827 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 13 March 1991
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unanimous endorsement by this Assembly of the UN Declaration of Victims' Rights. The Labor Party, at that early stage, wrote to VOCAL and said that we were fully supportive of this. I expected that perhaps a member of the Government might take the lead on this and introduce the motion to symbolically show our support for the Declaration of Victims' Rights, with Opposition support.
We waited and nothing happened. In late June of 1990 I issued a press release, which received some attention in the media, pledging Labor's support for the Declaration of Victims' Rights. Again I thought that might provoke some action, but nothing happened. So I put this matter on the notice paper in February and am moving the motion today. I am very pleased and proud to do so because it was a Labor government that was the first government in Australia to sponsor a resolution supporting the Declaration of Victims' Rights, and it must be said that when that was moved in the Parliament of South Australia it received the support of all parties; and I would expect that this motion would receive the support of all parties here today.
The declaration is, I am sure, non-controversial. It proposes commonsense principles of law enforcement, and I will go through them point by point somewhat later in my remarks. But I think it is appropriate that we today canvass in some detail how it came about that the United Nations in 1985 saw fit to sponsor a congress on the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders which led to this Declaration of Victims' Rights.
In ancient history the criminal law, by and large, depended upon the victim or the victim's family to seek retribution or justice from the offender. There is one member of this Assembly who would favour the citizens of Canberra walking around with pistols on their hips and doing the same thing in 1991, but I am sure that that is one voice out of 17. The rest of us accept that the criminal law has moved on and society has moved on, and now it is a matter for the state to bring prosecutions. The concept of private prosecutions still lives on as a vestige in the criminal law in Australia. But in most States, with the introduction of independent prosecution services under the direction of a director of public prosecutions, the opportunity has been taken to provide that the DPP can take over a private prosecution and quash it.
So, in effect, the old legal concept of the victim taking the law into their own hands, either literally by exacting retribution themselves - "an eye for an eye" in biblical parlance - or legally by launching a private prosecution, has fallen into disuse, and that is a fortunate thing. The state prosecuting crime is certainly better than the victim prosecuting crime; but the problem with private prosecutions, of course, is that, while it is all very well if you are rich and powerful - you can hire lawyers to prosecute a matter - the ordinary citizens in England basically had little option of doing that and tended to remain victims without redress.
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