Strengthening the Citizen-Victim’s Role Within a Public Conception

Abstract This chapter develops a normative framework to strengthen the role of victims as agents of state accountability, drawing on deliberative democratic theory and a unitary conception of the public interest rooted in substantive equality. It argues that victims should be recognized not merely as holders of private interests, but as citizens with the legitimacy and civic duty to hold prosecutorial decision-making to account, particularly when state actors fall short. Within this framework, victims can contribute substantively to identifying both individual and systemic prosecutorial failures, including those stemming from bias, self-interest, or entrenched inequalities. Their participation can enhance criminal law’s capacity to assign and communicate responsibility more accurately by exposing criminogenic dynamics in which the state itself plays a role. By incorporating experiential knowledge and social context into prosecutorial deliberations, victims help uncover institutional power imbalances, epistemic injustices, and systemic discrimination. Currently, victims’ accountability role is often conceived in ‘red light’ terms—correcting isolated errors. The framework proposed here expands this to ‘green light’ functions, encouraging continuous reflection and democratic improvement in support of a public interest grounded in substantive equality.