20th anniversary of the EFRJ

2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the European Forum for Restorative Justice (EFRJ). Since our first year in 2000, the EFRJ and his network has been working tirelessly to raise public awareness of restorative justice and its benefits, to influence public policy so that restorative justice is available, well resourced and accessible to all who need it, and to promote excellence in research and practice. All of you played a crucial role on the enduring history of the organisation. Now is time to celebrate and we encourage you to join us on the different initiatives we’ve launched for this occasion!

We started the celebration of our anniversary by launching a new and fresh visual style and a new slogan: “Connecting people to restore just relations”.  Next, we launched a call for testimonies, to give a voice to all those people who participated in restorative justice programmes in the past years. We also encourage our members to contribute to the Jubilee Magazine, a collection of articles on the past, present and future of the EFRJ and the restorative justice movement. We will conclude the year with the REstART Festival, a mix of online and live events on arts, justice, solidarity and repair. 

A little bit of history: Making cooperation work

The EFRJ was officially established exactly 20 years ago, after a preparatory period of a couple of years where a small group of committed people from different countries explored and discussed the desirability and feasibility of creating a European organisation.
There was a strong belief that we needed a process of re-thinking our understandings of crime and punishment and a strong need to integrate the victim’s perspective in probation and prison work. Already in the late 1960s,
 in the UK and The Netherlands some experiments included victim-offender groups and innovative programmes of restitution. Later on, under the influence of the victims movement, more attention was drawn to the needs and interests of the victim, fed by a strong concern that victims – through victim-offender mediation and other restorative justice practices – should not be ‘used’ or ‘instrumentalised’ on behalf of the offender. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that restorative justice should adopt an inclusive and impartial or, even better, a ‘multi-partial’ approach, offering recognition and support to both victim and offender, while also facilitating involvement of community members.
Today, the EFRJ brings together a wide range of professionals: practitioners and restorative justice services, policy makers, researchers and criminal justice practitioners from all over Europe and we’re proud to say that the EFRJ is by now the largest European NGO in restorative justice with a membership of about 500!

Memories of our past events

Our related initiatives