Compensation and Financial Redress for Victims of Terrorism
in Javier Argomaniz and Orla Lynch (Eds.), International Perspectives on Terrorist Victimisation (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015)
Posted: 19 Mar 2015
Date Written: March 16, 2015
Abstract
This chapter has two purposes. The first is to identify and analyse the contemporary approaches to compensation and financial redress for the victims of terrorism mainly with reference to the United Kingdom. Three approaches can be discerned over time. The first is to deny any special claim for redress. The second approach is to develop special state compensation schemes. The third approach involves the private law civil litigation. The second purpose of the chapter is to subject these approaches to a critical policy examination based on the purposes served by compensation and financial redress. One purpose involves individual restitution. Another purpose is social solidarity which can apply not only to a national population but in a cosmopolitan sense to foreign populations through emergency aid. These features call for a state response which protects collective interests and which promotes, in the words of the Preamble to the European Convention on the Compensation of Victims of Violent Crimes 1983, ‘equity and social solidarity’. A third aim is to nullify the harm from to terrorism to state interests, especially through economic dislocation.
Keywords: Terrorism, Victims, Litigation, Compensation
JEL Classification: K10, K14, K33, K19, K30, K33, K42, N40
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation