Survey report: Aligning restorative justice in the criminal justice system in the EU.

Source: (2013) Leuven: European Forum for Restorative Justice.

The overall aim of the consultation was to get insights into the criminal law of the EU member states as regards to RJ practices. The focus was not to assess precisely whether and how RJ practices are implemented in their legal context, but to scrutinise if such practices are applied by judges and public prosecutors and to foster if the provisions are correctly used by them according to RJ values and principles.
The purpose of the survey was threefold:
– In the first place we were interested to gather information about the knowledge and the understanding of RJ by judges and public prosecutors
– Secondly, we were seeking to collect information about the referral process of criminal cases to RJ programmes
– The third purpose was to identify the cooperation between the judges and public prosecutors and the mediators.
The survey followed the structure of these objectives and was divided in two main parts: general queries and specific queries. Pivotal to the above mentioned objectives, the main idea was to share these findings with a general view to foster tailored training models for legal practitioners in the future. (excerpt)