Activities

Seminars

Workshops in the framework of the project "Victims and Restorative Justice" - February 2012
Tilburg (the Netherlands), Helsinki (Finland) and Vienna (Austria)

The European Forum for Restorative Justice organises 3 regional workshops in the framework of the "Victims and Restorative Justice"-project, led by the Forum. The general objective of this project is to achieve more knowledge, through empirical evidence, on the needs, experiences and position of victims when participating in restorative justice (RJ) programmes. The development of RJ has led to some questions with regard to the position of the victim and therefore this project will deal with questions at both micro- and macro-level.

This project will lead to a better understanding of the needs, experiences and position of victims in victim-offender mediation and conferencing and will formulate recommendations with regard to the further development of restorative justice practices as well as the cooperation between restorative justice programmes and victim support organisations. More information on this project can be found here.

In the framework of this project 3 regional workshops will be organised during which the interim results of the project will be discussed. The 1st workshop will take place in Tilburg (the Netherlands) on 2 February 2012 and will be on "Victim policy and Mediation".
The 2nd one will be on "Victims and Restorative Justice: Violence in Intimate relationships" and will take place on 9 and 10 February 2012 in Helsinki (Finland). Visit the website of this workshop here.
The last workshop will take place in Vienna (Austria) on 28 February 2012 and will be entitled "Victims and Restorative Justice: What method to use?"

At a later stage the interim results of the project will also be discussed at an international conference, organised by the European Forum for Restorative Justice in Helsinki on 14, 15 and 16 June 2012. This conference will be entitled "Connecting people. Linking Victims, Communities and Offenders". More information on this international conference can be found here. (More information will be made available very soon).

Workshop 1 - "Victim Policy and Mediation", Tilburg, the Netherlands, 2 February 2012:
- Outline of the workshop
- Registration form

Workshop 2 - "Victims and Restorative Justice: Violence in intimate relationships", Helsinki, Finland, 9 - 10 February 2012:
Venue: Scandic Marina Congress Center
Website: http://www.confedent.fi/vom-2012/
- Outline of the workshop
- As this workshop is part of a bigger seminar, organised by the Finnish Ministry of Justice, registrations have to be made through the website of the seminar. Click here to visit the website and to register.
Deadline for registrations is 29 January 2012.

Workshop 3 - "Victims and Restorative Justice: What method to use?", Vienna, Austria, 28 February 2012:
Venue: NeuStart, Castelligasse 17, 1050 Vienna
- Outline of the workshop
- Registration form

For more information on these workshops, please contact Karolien Mariën at the Secretariat.

15 June 2011: RJ promoting the interests of victim and offender, Brussels (Belgium)

The European Forum will host a seminar on "RJ promoting the interests of victim and offender", with the support of the European Organisation for Probation (CEP) and the European Crime Prevention Network (EUCPN) (tbc). Possible cooperation with another prestigious European organisation, Victim Support Europe (VSE) is currently being explored. The seminar will take place on 15 June 2011 at the Brussels Info Place (BIP), situated at the very centre of Brussels.

The seminar will bring together representatives from victim and offender services, as well as representatives from the restorative justice field who will contribute to a better understanding of victims' and offenders' respective needs and expectations as a central point of the RJ approach.
We expect the presence of a diverse range of experts, practitioners, policy makers and academics, largely connected with criminal matters, who can provide an interesting and stimulating forum for ideas and practices.

A complete outline of the seminar can be found here.
The venue of the seminar is the Brussels Info Place (BIP), located at the very heart of Brussels.

The morning sessions will consist of plenary presentations, the afternoon will consist of workshop sessions and a closing plenary. Those of you who would like to present a workshop, please fill out the call for workshop proposals and send it back to Karolien Mariën before 30 April 2011.

If you would like to participate in the seminar, fill out the registration form and send it back to Karolien Mariën before 22 May 2011.

The 2011 Annual General Meeting of the European Forum will take place after the seminar, also at the BIP.

For more information on this seminar, please contact Karolien Mariën at the Secretariat.

14 - 16 September 2010: Expert seminar on conferencing, Leuven (Belgium)

The European Forum hosted a seminar on "Conferencing" from 14-16 September 2010 at the Faculty of Law, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. The seminar was organised within the framework of a project currently run by the Forum entitled "Conferncing: a way forward for restorative justice in Europe".

The seminar gathered about 60 participants (representing almost all continents and regions of the world), among which 20 were invited experts. All were present in order to make among other things, a very comprehensive state of affairs of conferencing, discuss past and current applications, best and worst practices, compare it with other restorative justice programmes, and examine the possibility of further developing the model.

The preliminary results of the project were first prsentented; the experts each gave a paper on the topic, either geographically or thematically. In the last session a reflection was started concerning the future of conferencing with a representative of the European Commission offering some concrete ideas of the policies currently run and to come, and other participants offering some concrete insights resulting from the seminar but also from their own experience.

The three days were busy and intensive but offering a unique opportunity to learn from each other, exchange thoughts and hopefully giving ideas and tools for the future development of restorative justice in general and conferencing in particular!

A more comprehensive report can be found here. Pictures of the event can be found here.

Programme of the seminar

For more information on the seminar or the conferencing project, please contact Estelle Zinsstag.

3 June 2009: Restorative Justice - Restorative Practices: Are they the same?

This seminar, which took place at the Faculty of Law of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), dealt with one of the core questions of restorative justice.

A proposal about broadening up the interpretation of restorative justice and the scope of the European Forum to include schools, community mediation and other societal contexts was presented at the General Meeting in 2008. The General Meeting was not ready to make a decision in this question, and the Board was asked to consider the issues brought forward and to deal with the proposal in an appropriate way, which should include consulting the membership and then putting the issue on the agenda of the next General Meeting. The Board had decided to organise a seminar with this topic linked to the General Meeting in 2009, and then put it on the agenda of the General Meeting in 2010.

As an introduction Martin Wright (UK), who presented the proposal last year, Ivo Aertsen (Belgium) and Inge Vanfraechem (Belgium) presented their views and reflections upon the relationship between restorative justice and restorative practices.

The seminar only dealt with the theoretical understanding of restorative justice and restorative practices, and their possible interrelatedness. The concrete question of broadening up the scope of the European Forum will be dealt with by the Board and the General Meeting. For the full consideration of this question, also financial, administrative and human resource questions must be considered.

The report of the seminar can be found here.

The presenations by the different speakers can be consulted here:
Martin Wright
Ivo Aertsen (will be available soon)
Inge Vanfraechem


3-5 June 2009: Building social support for restorative justice. Working together with media, civil society organisations and citizens for restorative justice

An international seminar, organised by the European Forum for Restorative Justice and the Catholic University of Leuven, co-funded by the European Commission in the framework of the JPEN programme.

The discussion on restorative justice has neglected public opinion and engagement with respect to this paradigm, despite the importance of social support and participation in restorative justice. Building social support for restorative justice will come through building on tendencies for more democratic participation within societies. With these concerns in mind, while having as a main goal building social support for restorative justice, this seminar will address three main questions:

1) How can interaction and cooperation with the media be set up in order to inform and educate the public about restorative justice?;
2) How can cooperation be developed with civil society organisations in order to inform and educate the public and to create broad support for restorative justice?;
3) How can we increase the involvement of individual citizens in the functioning of local restorative justice programmes?

The report of this seminar will be available soon.

Pictures of this seminar are available here.

The documents of the seminar can be found here:

10-12 May 2007: Restorative justice in Europe: Needs and possibilities

This seminar was organised in the context of the third EU co-funded AGIS project of the European Forum. This AGIS project deals with two interrelated topics: meeting the challenges of introducing restorative justice in Southern Europe on the one hand, and researching the possible role of the European Union in the further development of restorative justice in the whole of Europe on the other hand.

The documents of the seminar can be found here:

The presentations and reports of the workshops of the seminar are collected here.

Here you can see some pictures taken at the seminar.


29 September - 1 October 2005 : Meeting the challenges of introducing victim-offender mediation in Central and Eastern Europe

This seminar was the final event of the AGIS2 project.