Meeting the challenges of introducing victim-offender mediation in Central and Eastern European countries

Source: (2005) European Forum for Victim-Offender Mediation and Restorative Justice.

In the last two decades, restorative justice and victim-offender mediation have been more and more widely used in the criminal justice systems of several European countries. This publication intends to give a deeper insight in the main issues of its implementation, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe… While several studies have explored and analysed the procedural elements of different restorative practices, the policy-related issues raised by them and their influences on communities both on micro and macro level, there has been little emphasis on how its implementation can be effectively achieved in post-socialist countries where the abovementioned international tendencies still have to compete with the traditions of strongly centralised legal systems and with the continuing monopoly of the state in relation to responding to crime. (excerpt)