Activities
Seminars
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.
