Reimagining Restorative Justice by David O'Mahony Jonathan Doak

Author:David O'Mahony,Jonathan Doak [David O'Mahony,Jonathan Doak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849460569
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Mediation and Restorative Justice in Continental Europe

I.Introduction

While police-led restorative initiatives have expanded considerably in many common law jurisdictions, the development of mediation and restorative justice in continental Europe has tended to be led by the public prosecutor. In contrast to many common law jurisdictions, where the prosecutor’s role is adversarial to the offender, the prosecutor in most civil law jurisdictions occupies a quasi-judicial role, with an overall duty to ensure that the criminal investigation is carried out impartially and the offender is dealt with fairly.1 For example, in Germany and Austria the prosecutor is viewed not as an adversary of the defendant, but as a neutral advocate for the state. As such, they exercise close oversight over the criminal investigation, and are also seen as a largely objective source of information which the court will usually rely upon heavily for the purposes of sentencing.

Restorative interventions in continental Europe generally take the form of victim-offender mediation and are aimed primarily at juveniles.2 Many of these programmes were developed during the 1980s, but have expanded dramatically since the turn of the century.3 The continued growth of these programmes has been promoted by European and international standards, which have advocated mediation and other restorative practices.4 While the growth of restorative justice is reflected in the expansion of such practices throughout Europe, it has proven to be particularly popular in Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway. The majority of the mediation projects available are used as forms of diversion away from criminal sanctioning and are usually restricted to less serious property and minor personal offences,5 although, as we outline below, there is an increasing willingness to experiment at the ‘deeper end’ of the justice system. Most mediation-based programmes are not explicitly restorative. Although mediation is traditionally settlement-driven, recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on providing mediation programmes that have a stronger restorative focus, whereby they focus on the needs of the participants and are driven by dialogue and consent.6

Many descriptive accounts of the various European mediation-based programmes exist and there is considerable variation in what they do and how they operate.7 However, there has been a general lack of research to evaluate such schemes, although more concrete data has emerged in recent years. In this chapter, we examine a range of mediation and restorative practices, drawing, in particular, from evaluations of the more developed programmes across the continent. It is not our intention to provide a comprehensive description of individual programmes; that task that has been admirably accomplished elsewhere.8 Rather, we aim to give an insight of the range of practices that exist, the factors which have served to either propel or hinder their development, and the extent to which they might be capable of delivering a restorative and empowering experience whereby participants are able to achieve a strong sense of agency and accountability.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.