Publications

This up-to-date publication in the field of restorative justice gives a good overview of what really is happening in practice, legislation and policy, as well as what does research show on the evaluation of restorative justice programmes in Europe.
Facts and figures on these and other topics are presented in a comparative way in this comprehensive review, which covers the developments in no less than 25 European countries.

The book can be ordered directly from the Secretariat of the European Forum.
The price is 15 Euro for members and 25 Euro for non-members (+ postal costs).

This book outlines the main features of restorative justice, including different models and research findings, and proposes guidelines for setting up programmes. It also identifies problems and ways of dealing with them. This guide provides essential information for those planning to introduce restorative justice in their country. For countries that have already done so, it offers an opportunity to review practice in the light of experiences and research elsewhere.

The book can be ordered directly from Council of Europe Publishing, e-mail: publishing@coe.int.

It is also available in French under the title Renouer les liens sociaux - Médiation et justice réparatrice en Europe (ISBN (92-871-5451-1).

This is the final report of the second AGIS project that was run by the European Forum.

It can be downloaded for free here.

This book brings together some of the papers that were presented at the 1999 conference of the European Forum.

In the first part of this book, victim-offender mediation and restorative justice are being considered from a more theoretical point of view. In his contribution, Martin Wright contends that there is no hard-and-fast division between measures that are restorative and those that are not. Rather there is a spectrum. He describes unilateral, democratic and authoritarian restorative justice as three points on this continuum. Jacques Faget approaches the difficulty of involving the community in criminal justice and mediation from a European perspective. He also describes two structural problems which limit the impact of community involvement, namely a spiral of professionalisation and a spiral of dependency. In Chapter 3, Robert Mackay addresses the topic of how to develop and maintain mediation practices which respect ethical principles, and which are of good quality for victims and offenders. At the end of his contribution, he proposes an outline of a statement of principles for a code of ethics in restorative justice. In his contribution, Marc Groenhuijsen argues that victim-offender mediation - as part of the criminal procedure and as a means of diversion - can be justified by the basic propositions of the philosophy of traditional criminal law and procedure. He also identifies several topics in need of special attention, for example, some specific needs of victims which have been neglected up till now. Siri Ilona Kemény describes the emergence of restorative justice in Norway, and identifies some future challenges. In Chapter 6, Elmar Weitekamp gives an overview of research findings in the field of restorative justice, and identifies what kind of research is needed in the future in order to improve victim-offender mediation and restorative justice.

The second part of the book consists of overviews of the state of affairs on victim-offender mediation in the eight countries in which it had developed the most up till then (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom). For these chapters, a multitude of information was collected in each of the countries, and this is presented and analysed in a comparable way. For each of these countries, following topics are being discussed: the history of victim-offender mediation in that particular country, the legal context, policy and implementation, the number of programmes and the way they function, the practice of mediation, the number and characteristics of cases, evaluation and research, and finally challenges, obstacles and expectations for the future. The gathering of information and data for these countries was concluded in the period August-September 1999. It is probably for the first time that such extensive reports on the practice of victim-offender mediation in Europe have been brought together in a comparative way.

This book can be ordered via  Amazon.com or via Cornell University Press. For a quick delivery in Europe, the book can be ordered here.