All 880 Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal decisions are now searchable on Vizlegal

The amended Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, published on 27 July 2026, removed the exclusion that had kept pain and suffering outside the Tribunal's awards, and practitioners have to form a view on what an award for non-material harm is likely to look like.

Ministerial guidance on award levels is expected in autumn 2026. Until it issues, the nearest thing to an evidence base is the Tribunal's own record, and Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal decisions have never been easy to search in any systematic way.

That record is now available in full on Vizlegal. All 880 decisions of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal are live as a searchable source, the 38th on the platform, and they can be read alongside judgments, tribunal decisions, and European case law in the same query.

The complete set of 880 decisions is indexed and full-text searchable. Within the source, practitioners can:

• Filter by the paragraph of the Scheme a decision turns on, which is the fastest route to comparable reasoning.
• Filter by tribunal member, to see how a particular member has approached similar applications.
• Filter by decision date, which matters while the pre-amendment and post-amendment positions sit side by side.
• Set an alert and receive an email when a new decision is published.

Because the source sits inside the wider corpus, a single search can run across Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal decisions and the other sources on the platform, including Irish judgments, Employment Decisions from the WRC and the Labour Court, International Protection Appeals Tribunal decisions, Data Protection Commission decisions, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, and England and Wales material. For a practitioner tracing how the Case C-284/24 reasoning is being picked up, that matters more than the Tribunal set on its own.

The judgment behind the amendment

The change to the Scheme follows the Court of Justice of the European Union judgment of 2 October 2025 in Case C-284/24, on a reference from the High Court. The Court held that Article 12(2) of Directive 2004/80/EC precludes a national compensation scheme that categorically excludes non-material harm, and that compensation cannot be purely symbolic or manifestly insufficient measured against the seriousness of the crime.

The Scheme has operated since 1974 and was revised in 1986 and 2021. The Department has signalled further reform, informed by the Law Reform Commission's recommendation that the Scheme be placed on a statutory footing, so the position described here is an interim one.